Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/6] KVM: mmu: also return page from gfn_to_pfn

From: Nicholas Piggin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2021 20:42:08 +1000

Excerpts from Paolo Bonzini's message of June 24, 2021 8:21 pm:
> On 24/06/21 12:17, Nicholas Piggin wrote:
>>> If all callers were updated that is one thing, but from the changelog
>>> it sounds like that would not happen and there would be some gfn_to_pfn
>>> users left over.
>>>
>>> But yes in the end you would either need to make gfn_to_pfn never return
>>> a page found via follow_pte, or change all callers to the new way. If
>>> the plan is for the latter then I guess that's fine.
>>
>> Actually in that case anyway I don't see the need -- the existence of
>> gfn_to_pfn is enough to know it might be buggy. It can just as easily
>> be grepped for as kvm_pfn_page_unwrap.
> 
> Sure, but that would leave us with longer function names 
> (gfn_to_pfn_page* instead of gfn_to_pfn*).  So the "safe" use is the one 
> that looks worse and the unsafe use is the one that looks safe.

The churn isn't justified because of function name length. Choose g2pp() 
if you want a non-descriptive but short name.

The existing name isn't good anyway because it not only looks up a pfn 
but also a page, and more importantly it gets a ref on the page. The
name should be changed if you introduce a new API.

>> And are gfn_to_page cases also
>> vulernable to the same issue?
> 
> No, they're just broken for the VM_IO|VM_PFNMAP case.

No they aren't vulnerable, or they are vunlerable but also broken in 
other cases?

Thanks,
Nick