Re: [Bug 1886362] [NEW] Heap use-after-free in lduw_he_p through e1000e_write_to_rx_buffers

[Peter Maydell]

On Tue, 21 Jul 2020 at 14:21, Jason Wang <jasowang@redhat.com> wrote:
> On 2020/7/21 下午8:31, Peter Maydell wrote:
> > On Wed, 15 Jul 2020 at 09:36, Jason Wang <jasowang@redhat.com> wrote:
> >> I think the point is to make DMA to MMIO work as real hardware.
> > I wouldn't care to give a 100% guarantee that asking a real
> > h/w device to DMA to itself didn't cause it to misbehave :-)
> > It's more likely to happen-to-work because the DMA engine bit
> > of a real h/w device is going to be decoupled somewhat from
> > the respond-to-memory-transactions-for-registers logic, but
> > it probably wasn't something the designers were actively
> > thinking about either...

> I think some device want such peer to peer transactions:
>
> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/Documentation/driver-api/pci/p2pdma.rst

That's a device DMAing to another device, not DMAing to *itself*
(device-to-another-device DMA should work fine in QEMU). And only
a very few devices will ever be sensible targets of the DMA --
basically things like nvme that have a looks-like-memory area,
or special cases like doorbell registers.

> > Yeah, this is the interesting part for QEMU. How should we
> > structure devices that do DMA so that we can be sure that
> > the device emulation at least doesn't crash? We could have
> > a rule that all devices that do DMA must always postpone
> > all of that DMA to a bottom-half, but that's a lot of
> > refactoring of a lot of device code...
>
>
> It looks to me the issue happens only for device with loopback

I think in principle we have a problem for any device that
(a) has memory mapped registers and (b) does DMA reads
whose address is guest-controlled. Loopback isn't a
requirement -- if the guest programs, say, an RX descriptor
base address to point at the device's own registers, you
get exactly the same kind of unexpected-reentrancy.

thanks
-- PMM