• Avi Kivity's avatar
    KVM: Prevent system selectors leaking into guest on real->protected mode transition on vmx · 6af11b9e
    Avi Kivity authored
    Intel virtualization extensions do not support virtualizing real mode.  So
    kvm uses virtualized vm86 mode to run real mode code.  Unfortunately, this
    virtualized vm86 mode does not support the so called "big real" mode, where
    the segment selector and base do not agree with each other according to the
    real mode rules (base == selector << 4).
    
    To work around this, kvm checks whether a selector/base pair violates the
    virtualized vm86 rules, and if so, forces it into conformance.  On a
    transition back to protected mode, if we see that the guest did not touch
    a forced segment, we restore it back to the original protected mode value.
    
    This pile of hacks breaks down if the gdt has changed in real mode, as it
    can cause a segment selector to point to a system descriptor instead of a
    normal data segment.  In fact, this happens with the Windows bootloader
    and the qemu acpi bios, where a protected mode memcpy routine issues an
    innocent 'pop %es' and traps on an attempt to load a system descriptor.
    
    "Fix" by checking if the to-be-restored selector points at a system segment,
    and if so, coercing it into a normal data segment.  The long term solution,
    of course, is to abandon vm86 mode and use emulation for big real mode.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAvi Kivity <avi@qumranet.com>
    6af11b9e
vmx.c 52.4 KB