Hi, before going wild with my idea, I would like to collect some comments on this approach:
While doing first kernel debugging with my debug register patches for
kvm, I quickly ran into the 4-breakpoints-only limitation that comes
from the fact that we blindly map software to hardware breakpoints.
Unhandy, simply suboptimal. Also, having 4 breakpoint slots hard-coded
in the generic interface is not fair to arch that may support more.
Moreover, we do not support watchpoints although this would easily be
feasible. But if we supported watchpoints (via debug registers on x86),
we would need the break out of the 4 slots limitations even earlier. In
short, I came to the conclusion that a rewrite of the KVM_DEBUG_GUEST
interface is required.
Why do we set breakpoints in the kernel? Why not simply catching all
debug traps, inserting software breakpoint ops into the guest code, and
handling all this stuff as normal debuggers do? And the hardware
breakpoints should just be pushed through the kernel interface like
ptrace does.
The new KVM_DEBUG_GUEST interface I currently have in mind would look
like this:
#define KVM_DBGGUEST_ENABLE 0x01
#define KVM_DBGGUEST_SINGLESTEP 0x02
struct kvm_debug_guest {
__u32 control;
struct kvm_debug_guest_arch arch;
}
Setting KVM_DBGGUEST_ENABLE would forward all debug-related traps to
userspace first, which can then decide to handle or re-inject them.
KVM_DBGGUEST_SINGLESTEP would work as before. And the extension for x86
would look like this:
struct kvm_debug_guest_arch {
__u32 use_hw_breakpoints;
__u64 debugreg[8];
}
If use_hw_breakpoints is non-zero, KVM would completely overwrite the
guest's debug registers with the content of debugreg, giving full
control of this feature to the host-side debugger (faking the content of
debug registers, effectively disabling them for the guest - as we now do
all the time).
Questions:
- Does anyone see traps and pitfalls in this approach?
- May I replace the existing interface with this one, or am I overseeing
some use case that already worked with the current code so that ABI
compatibility is required (most debug stuff should have been simply
broken so far, also due to bugs in userland)?
Jan
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