[vbox-dev] Replacing VbglPhysHeapAlloc with kmalloc for linux vboxguest module ?

[Knut St. Osmundsen]

Hi Hans.

On 2017-07-06 11:13 AM, Hans de Goede wrote:
> Hi,
>
> VbglPhysHeapAlloc seems to be yet another mem-allocator
> which chunks up memory returned by RTMemContAlloc, which
> returns physical contiguous memory below 4GB.
Need for keeping the code cross platform, not all supported guest have
nice and efficient memory management functions.

>
> I don't see any reason why we cannot use kmalloc directly
> for that with a GFP_DMA32 flag.
>
> One other thing which RTMemContAlloc seems to do is mark
> the pages executable. Does memory used by VbglGRAlloc /
> VbglGRPerform need to be marked executable ?
Hysterical raisins.  The RTMemContAlloc API is really ancient, the x86
world was 32-bit only and the NX bit existed only in AMD64 preliminary
docs.  It is(/was?) also used for various trampoline code (logging, ++)
and world switchers (VMM/VMMSwitcher/*), which needed to be executable,
thus all memory it returns is executable. 

That the phys heap in VBoxGuest is working with memory marked executable
is just a side effect of that API requirement.  I'm not aware of any
reason why these allocations would need to be executable.  We should
probably address this ourselves too.

Kind Regards,
-bird