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Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/virt')
| -rw-r--r-- | Documentation/virt/kvm/s390/index.rst | 1 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | Documentation/virt/kvm/s390/s390-pv-dump.rst | 64 |
2 files changed, 65 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/virt/kvm/s390/index.rst b/Documentation/virt/kvm/s390/index.rst index 605f488f0cc5..44ec9ab14b59 100644 --- a/Documentation/virt/kvm/s390/index.rst +++ b/Documentation/virt/kvm/s390/index.rst @@ -10,3 +10,4 @@ KVM for s390 systems s390-diag s390-pv s390-pv-boot + s390-pv-dump diff --git a/Documentation/virt/kvm/s390/s390-pv-dump.rst b/Documentation/virt/kvm/s390/s390-pv-dump.rst new file mode 100644 index 000000000000..e542f06048f3 --- /dev/null +++ b/Documentation/virt/kvm/s390/s390-pv-dump.rst @@ -0,0 +1,64 @@ +.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0 + +=========================================== +s390 (IBM Z) Protected Virtualization dumps +=========================================== + +Summary +------- + +Dumping a VM is an essential tool for debugging problems inside +it. This is especially true when a protected VM runs into trouble as +there's no way to access its memory and registers from the outside +while it's running. + +However when dumping a protected VM we need to maintain its +confidentiality until the dump is in the hands of the VM owner who +should be the only one capable of analysing it. + +The confidentiality of the VM dump is ensured by the Ultravisor who +provides an interface to KVM over which encrypted CPU and memory data +can be requested. The encryption is based on the Customer +Communication Key which is the key that's used to encrypt VM data in a +way that the customer is able to decrypt. + + +Dump process +------------ + +A dump is done in 3 steps: + +**Initiation** + +This step initializes the dump process, generates cryptographic seeds +and extracts dump keys with which the VM dump data will be encrypted. + +**Data gathering** + +Currently there are two types of data that can be gathered from a VM: +the memory and the vcpu state. + +The vcpu state contains all the important registers, general, floating +point, vector, control and tod/timers of a vcpu. The vcpu dump can +contain incomplete data if a vcpu is dumped while an instruction is +emulated with help of the hypervisor. This is indicated by a flag bit +in the dump data. For the same reason it is very important to not only +write out the encrypted vcpu state, but also the unencrypted state +from the hypervisor. + +The memory state is further divided into the encrypted memory and its +metadata comprised of the encryption tweaks and status flags. The +encrypted memory can simply be read once it has been exported. The +time of the export does not matter as no re-encryption is +needed. Memory that has been swapped out and hence was exported can be +read from the swap and written to the dump target without need for any +special actions. + +The tweaks / status flags for the exported pages need to be requested +from the Ultravisor. + +**Finalization** + +The finalization step will provide the data needed to be able to +decrypt the vcpu and memory data and end the dump process. When this +step completes successfully a new dump initiation can be started. |