[SeaBIOS] Problem with Debug lvl under XEN

Daniel Castro evil.dani at gmail.com
Tue Feb 14 11:38:12 CET 2012


On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 7:08 PM, Ian Campbell <Ian.Campbell at citrix.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2012-02-14 at 00:33 +0000, Kevin O'Connor wrote:
>> On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 08:50:56PM +0000, Ian Campbell wrote:
>> > On Mon, 2012-02-13 at 23:21 +0900, Daniel Castro wrote:
>> > > Hello,
>> > >
>> > > I have encountered something a little strange, if I set up the debug
>> > > lvl to 3 or more Y will get a Triple VCPU fault. If I set it to 1 the
>> > > bios runs normally but I loose a lot of information that I need to
>> > > debug. Sometimes if I try to print char * variables regardless of the
>> > > debug level I still get the fault.
>> > >
>> > > Any ideas why?
>> >
>> > My guess is that there is a debug print at lvl>=3 which ends up
>> > dereferencing a NULL pointer in one of its arguments (probably a %s) and
>> > this leads to a page fault. This in turn leads to a double fault because
>> > SeaBIOS does not install a page fault handler and then a triple fault
>> > because it also does not install a double fault handler. Likewise when
>> > you are printing "char * variables regardless of the debug level".
>>
>> SeaBIOS doesn't have paging enabled, so it should not need to install
>> a page fault handler.
>
> Doh, yes you are obviously right!
>
> In my defence when running virtualised paging may actually be enabled
> contrary to what the guest thinks is going on (I think this is needed in
> order to run real-mode code on EPT with a 1-1 map).
>
> Really the hypervisor should completely hide this from the guest. I'm
> not actually sure what Xen does but it may well take the easy way out
> and rely on the BIOS not faulting... It still ought to print at least
> the faulting address and IP on triple fault though. It may be useful for
> Daniel to patch xen/arch/x86/hvm/hvm.c:hvm_triple_fault to add this
> information.
>
>>   SeaBIOS needs to write the real-mode interrupt
>> descriptor table to address 0, so it should definitely have read/write
>> access to the memory there.  Thus, a null pointer dereference
>> shouldn't cause a fault.  Indeed, I can't think of much that should
>> cause a fault (other than read/write to IO memory incorrectly, divide
>> by zero, invalid opcode, etc.).
>
> An invalid pointer other than NULL might also do it, e.g. I think Xen
> scrubs memory (in a debug build) to something like 0xcc.
>
> In that case a NULL check won't work but I suppose one could use a patch
> which treats %s as %p for the purposes of debugging it...
>
>> > You could test this by adding an explicit check for null in the bit of
>> > bvprintf which handles %s, perhaps putc()ing "(null)" instead.
>>
>> If you think it is specific to the Xen handling, one could also try
>> running the same code on qemu to verify it.
>
> Also trying the underlying SeaBIOS version without any local patches
> would be a good idea if you haven't already.
Well I suspected some limitation on the stack or something like that,
so I decided to divide the code in a succession of function calls, for
example:
int share_vbd(char* device);
int share_vbd2(char * device, char * state);
int share_vbd3((char * device, char * state, char *back_end_path);
etc...

Anyway now the fault is not present, it is the same code just that I
called it in a succesion of function... So my best guess is that I was
over running the stack.

Thank you all for the suggestion, I will implement Ian's suggestions.

Daniel

>
> Ian.
>
>



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