Avi Kivity reported that page faults in NMIs could cause havic if
the NMI preempted another page fault handler:
The recent changes to NMI allow exceptions to take place in NMI
handlers, but I think that a #PF (say, due to access to vmalloc space)
is still problematic. Consider the sequence
#PF (cr2 set by processor)
NMI
...
#PF (cr2 clobbered)
do_page_fault()
IRET
...
IRET
do_page_fault()
address = read_cr2()
The last line reads the overwritten cr2 value.
Originally I wrote a patch to solve this by saving the cr2 on the stack.
Brian Gerst suggested to save it in the r12 register as both r12 and rbx
are saved by the do_nmi handler as required by the C standard. But rbx
is already used for saving if swapgs needs to be run on exit of the NMI
handler.
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/4FBB8C40.6080304@redhat.com
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1337763411.13348.140.camel@gandalf.stny.rr.com
Reported-by: Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Suggested-by: Brian Gerst <brgerst@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>