On Tue, 2025-11-25 at 18:05 +0000, Khushit Shah wrote:
Add two flags for KVM_CAP_X2APIC_API to allow userspace to control support for Suppress EOI Broadcasts, which KVM completely mishandles. When x2APIC support was first added, KVM incorrectly advertised and "enabled" Suppress EOI Broadcast, without fully supporting the I/O APIC side of the equation, i.e. without adding directed EOI to KVM's in-kernel I/O APIC.
That flaw was carried over to split IRQCHIP support, i.e. KVM advertised support for Suppress EOI Broadcasts irrespective of whether or not the userspace I/O APIC implementation supported directed EOIs. Even worse, KVM didn't actually suppress EOI broadcasts, i.e. userspace VMMs without support for directed EOI came to rely on the "spurious" broadcasts.
KVM "fixed" the in-kernel I/O APIC implementation by completely disabling support for Suppress EOI Broadcasts in commit 0bcc3fb95b97 ("KVM: lapic: stop advertising DIRECTED_EOI when in-kernel IOAPIC is in use"), but didn't do anything to remedy userspace I/O APIC implementations.
KVM's bogus handling of Suppress EOI Broadcast is problematic when the guest relies on interrupts being masked in the I/O APIC until well after the initial local APIC EOI. E.g. Windows with Credential Guard enabled handles interrupts in the following order:
- Interrupt for L2 arrives.
- L1 APIC EOIs the interrupt.
- L1 resumes L2 and injects the interrupt.
- L2 EOIs after servicing.
- L1 performs the I/O APIC EOI.
Because KVM EOIs the I/O APIC at step #2, the guest can get an interrupt storm, e.g. if the IRQ line is still asserted and userspace reacts to the EOI by re-injecting the IRQ, because the guest doesn't de-assert the line until step #4, and doesn't expect the interrupt to be re-enabled until step #5.
Unfortunately, simply "fixing" the bug isn't an option, as KVM has no way of knowing if the userspace I/O APIC supports directed EOIs, i.e. suppressing EOI broadcasts would result in interrupts being stuck masked in the userspace I/O APIC due to step #5 being ignored by userspace. And fully disabling support for Suppress EOI Broadcast is also undesirable, as picking up the fix would require a guest reboot, *and* more importantly would change the virtual CPU model exposed to the guest without any buy-in from userspace.
Add two flags to allow userspace to choose exactly how to solve the immediate issue, and in the long term to allow userspace to control the virtual CPU model that is exposed to the guest (KVM should never have enabled support for Suppress EOI Broadcast without a userspace opt-in).
Note, Suppress EOI Broadcasts is defined only in Intel's SDM, not in AMD's APM. But the bit is writable on some AMD CPUs, e.g. Turin, and KVM's ABI is to support Directed EOI (KVM's name) irrespective of guest CPU vendor.
Fixes: 7543a635aa09 ("KVM: x86: Add KVM exit for IOAPIC EOIs") Closes: https://lore.kernel.org/kvm/7D497EF1-607D-4D37-98E7-DAF95F099342@nutanix.com Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org Co-developed-by: Sean Christopherson seanjc@google.com Signed-off-by: Sean Christopherson seanjc@google.com Signed-off-by: Khushit Shah khushit.shah@nutanix.com
Reviewed-by: Kai Huang kai.huang@intel.com