[vbox-dev] Question regarding - tr.flags and TSS_BUSY

[Michal Necasek]

   Hi Alexander,

 Thanks for the information. I believe you that there is a problem, and the comments in the code indicate as much, but I still don't understand the failure scenario on the virtual CPU level.

 Can you confirm that there is task switching involved in a 32-bit guest? Can you please explain exactly at what point the incorrect TSS busy bit value triggers problems? Is it during a task switch (I think it has to be)? What kind of a task switch is it, i.e. what triggered it? JMP, CALL, interrupt...?

 The busy flag management in the recompiler task switch (switch_tss()) looks fishy and is almost certainly wrong, but I need to understand more. And I think you're right that the VirtualBox<->recompiler transitions should leave the busy flag alone. But I still don't understand exactly how it's causing problems.

 Incidentally, what is 'Qemu+SVM'? That is not SVM as in Secure Virtual Machine aka AMD-V, is it?


      Regards,
         Michal

----- Original Message -----
From: alexander.boettcher at genode-labs.com
To: michal.necasek at oracle.com, vbox-dev at virtualbox.org
Sent: Monday, March 13, 2017 1:45:19 PM GMT +01:00 Amsterdam / Berlin / Bern / Rome / Stockholm / Vienna
Subject: Re: [vbox-dev] Question regarding - tr.flags and TSS_BUSY

Hello,

On 10.03.2017 17:05, Michal Necasek wrote:
>  Could you please describe your use case, or rather how we can reproduce
> the problem?

I feared you ask - but nevertheless - when running VirtualBox inside
Qemu+SVM (and no kvm enabled) with our ported Version of VBox to
Genode/NOVA.

> This is not code we want to change without precisely
> understanding why it needs to change and testing the behavior.

I can imagine.

> 
>  Also, why are you using the recompiler at all? On a typical system with
> hardware virtualization, it should be used very little or not at all.

Probably this is right for the vanilla Virtualbox as you provide. In our
Vbox 4 (4.3.40) ported version we mainly use REM + hw accelerated
(interface provided by the Microkernel NOVA), there it triggers reliable
if running in Qemu.

For the VBox 5 (5.1.14) port to Genode we enabled also the IEM, but here
it also trigger in Qemu+SVM (no-kvm).

You may have luck, Qemu just succeeds running Vbox and the VM - iif the
preemption (due to interrupts to be injected by the VBox VMM) of the
Guest VM (Microkernel+Genode setup) is that, that you ever get a tr
register with set busy bit.

I understand that our use-case is maybe of no interest to the majority
(even we mainly use it for early debugging in Qemu) - nevertheless we
wanted you just let know that there is a issue.


Cheers,

Alex.
-- 
Alexander Boettcher
Genode Labs

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