Mailing List Archive: XSM and privcmd_ioctl

On 12/26/2012 12:53 AM, Tamas Lengyel wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm using the v6 XSM patch-set (
> http://lists.xen.org/archives/html/xen-devel/2012-11/msg01920.html) to
> perform dom0 disaggregation but I came across two ioctl functions in the
> Linux privcmd driver that were getting -EPERM errors in my secondary
> control domU. The problem is that the permission checks are not coming from
> XSM but the Kernel itself, when XSM should be in charge of access control.
>
> The two functions in Linux 3.x kernel are *privcmd_ioctl_mmap *and *
> privcmd_ioctl_mmap_batch*:
>
> driver/xen/privcmd.c@199 and @319 in Linux 3.7.0:
>
> * if (!xen_initial_domain())*
> * return -EPERM;*
> *
> *
> Are these checks still needed when the XSM patches are applied?
>
> Thanks,
> Tamas

No, those checks were never needed, with or without XSM; they were trying
to enforce hypervisor-level access control in Linux, which was at best a
slight performance improvement. They should be removed; I will submit a
patch to remove them if you don't want to submit it yourself, since they
do break control domains.

--
Daniel De Graaf
National Security Agency

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