Re: Qemu plugin vs. valgrind

[Alex Bennée]

Marc Hacin <address@hidden> writes:

> Le 31/03/2020 à 02:28, Benjamin a écrit :
>> Perhaps you're looking for something like this?
>> https://wiki.qemu.org/Internships/ProjectIdeas/CacheModelling
>
> I don't think so.
> I made a few tries of a plugin, made from copy/pasting existing ones
> in QEMU's github.
>
> I would like to monitor how data, in guest code, obtained by read()
> [user] or I/O registers [system], scatters in guest memory by
> side-effects.
> One side-effect I'm thinking of is when a guest core register holding
> such data because of calculations on it, is saved on the stack because 
> of a call. And then in another call an uninitialized local variable
> unlikely gets its value from this register saving.

So at the moment you can't see the register contents. But I'm not quite
following this "side effect" you are talking about. Any instruction that
either loads or stores something in memory can be instrumented without
knowledge of in which register the address was held in.

If you really need to track that you could disassemble each instruction
at translation time to work out which registers are being used.

> Something like https://github.com/wmkhoo/taintgrind
>
> After the tries I made with my QEMU plugin, and use of "-d in_asm,op
> -dfilter x+n", I think that these plugins cannot serve my need (but 
> global stats).
> I should have to dig into in_asm->op conversions, probably a too
> complex task. To add tracking code of a "tainted" attribute to every
> byte of guest memory and registers.

That is an internal implementation detail the TCG plugins will never expose.

>
> From -d, I guess that guest registers are emulated by standard host
> variables ?

Again an internal implementation detail the plugins don't expose.

> With my understanding of the TCG based emulation, the supercalar /
> pipelines properties of the guest processor may be not emulated, but 
> conforms to the host. Am I right ?

Yes - QEMU is not attempting to emulate any micro architectural details.
It only cares about getting the semantics of the emulated instruction
correct.

> On my tests, mono-core, it seems that the load/store callback is
> called just after the call of the instruction-before callback which is
> the source of the load/store. I didn't see any intermix between memory
> and instruction callback, as it is the case on the real guest core.

Why would there be? All memory operations will be the result of an
instruction being executed.

> It would be great for users (like me) that QEMU provide another plugin
> stage, at the "in_asm->op" process, as there are useful possible 
> analysers features here. Same as the popular valgrind's ones (and
> valgrind is not cross-arch/OS as QEMU is).
> A bigger dream would be plugins compatibility to inherit valgrind ones
> (but IRs are not the same I think).

We very deliberately don't expose internal TCG details. I suggest you
re-read docs/devel/tcg-plugins.rst for the rationale about this. 

>
>
>> QEMU also supports a GDB stub, which might help with your last question.
>> https://wiki.qemu.org/Features/gdbstub
>
> Eventually, I have tested my plugin with a user mode guest statically
> and absolutely linked ELF (with no relocations).
> Then I passed trigger information to my plugin via the argv feature.
>
>
> Thanks for your answers.


-- 
Alex Bennée