[Bug 1708305] Re: Realtime feature mlockall: Cannot allocate memory

Edward Hope-Morley edward.hope-morley at canonical.com
Mon Aug 21 14:46:32 UTC 2017


just for clarity i'm nominating for newton and it will be marked as
invalid since there is no libvirt in newton uca

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1708305

Title:
  Realtime feature mlockall: Cannot allocate memory

Status in Ubuntu Cloud Archive:
  Fix Committed
Status in Ubuntu Cloud Archive mitaka series:
  In Progress
Status in Ubuntu Cloud Archive ocata series:
  In Progress
Status in libvirt package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released
Status in libvirt source package in Xenial:
  In Progress
Status in libvirt source package in Zesty:
  Fix Committed
Status in libvirt source package in Artful:
  Fix Released

Bug description:
  [Impact]

   * Guest definitions that uses locked memory + hugepages fail to spawn

   * Backport upstream fix to solve that issue

  
  [Environment]

  root at buneary:~# lsb_release -a
  No LSB modules are available.
  Distributor ID:	Ubuntu
  Description:	Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS
  Release:	16.04
  Codename:	xenial

  root at buneary:~# uname -r
  4.10.0-29-generic

  Reproducible also with the 4.4 kernel.

  [Detailed Description]

  When a guest memory backing stanza is defined using the <locked/> stanza + hugepages,
  as follows:

    <memoryBacking>
      <hugepages>
        <page size='1' unit='GiB' nodeset='0'/>
        <page size='1' unit='GiB' nodeset='1'/>
      </hugepages>
      <nosharedpages/>
      <locked/>
    </memoryBacking>

  (Full guest definition: http://paste.ubuntu.com/25229162/)

  The guest fails to start due to the following error:

  2017-08-02 20:25:03.714+0000: starting up libvirt version: 1.3.1, package: 1ubuntu10.12 (Christian Ehrhardt <christian.ehrhardt at canonical.com> Wed, 19 Jul 2017 08:28:14 +0200), qemu version: 2.5.0 (Debian 1:2.5+dfsg-5ubuntu10.14), hostname: buneary.seg
  LC_ALL=C PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin QEMU_AUDIO_DRV=none /usr/bin/kvm-spice -name reproducer2 -S -machine pc-i440fx-2.5,accel=kvm,usb=off -cpu host -m 124928 -realtime mlock=on -smp 32,sockets=16,cores=1,threads=2 -object memory-backend-file,id=ram-node0,prealloc=yes,mem-path=/dev/hugepages/libvirt/qemu,share=yes,size=64424509440,host-nodes=0,policy=bind -numa node,nodeid=0,cpus=0-15,memdev=ram-node0 -object memory-backend-file,id=ram-node1,prealloc=yes,mem-path=/dev/hugepages/libvirt/qemu,share=yes,size=66571993088,host-nodes=1,policy=bind -numa node,nodeid=1,cpus=16-31,memdev=ram-node1 -uuid 2460778d-979b-4024-9a13-0c3ca04b18ec -no-user-config -nodefaults -chardev socket,id=charmonitor,path=/var/lib/libvirt/qemu/domain-reproducer2/monitor.sock,server,nowait -mon chardev=charmonitor,id=monitor,mode=control -rtc base=utc -no-shutdown -boot strict=on -device piix3-usb-uhci,id=usb,bus=pci.0,addr=0x1.0x2 -drive file=/var/lib/uvtool/libvirt/images/test-ds.qcow,format=qcow2,if=none,id=drive-virtio-disk0,cache=none -device virtio-blk-pci,scsi=off,bus=pci.0,addr=0x3,drive=drive-virtio-disk0,id=virtio-disk0,bootindex=1 -chardev pty,id=charserial0 -device isa-serial,chardev=charserial0,id=serial0 -vnc 127.0.0.1:0 -device cirrus-vga,id=video0,bus=pci.0,addr=0x2 -device virtio-balloon-pci,id=balloon0,bus=pci.0,addr=0x4 -msg timestamp=on
  Domain id=14 is tainted: host-cpu
  char device redirected to /dev/pts/1 (label charserial0)

  mlockall: Cannot allocate memory

  2017-08-02T20:25:37.732772Z qemu-system-x86_64: locking memory failed
  2017-08-02 20:25:37.811+0000: shutting down

  This seems to be due to the setrlimit for RLIMIT_MEMLOCK is too low for mlockall
  to work given the large amount of memory.

  There is a libvirt upstream patch that enforces the existence of the
  hard_limit stanza when using with <locked/> in the memory backing settings.

  https://github.com/libvirt/libvirt/commit/c2e60ad0e5124482942164e5fec088157f5e716a

  Memory locking can only work properly if the memory locking limit
  for the QEMU process has been raised appropriately: the default one
  is extremely low, so there's no way the guest will fit in there.

  The commit
  https://github.com/libvirt/libvirt/commit/7e667664d28f90bf6916604a55ebad7e2d85305b
  is also required when using hugepages and the locked stanza.

  [Test Case]
   * Define a guest that uses the following stanzas (See for a full guest reference: http://paste.ubuntu.com/25288141/)

    <memory unit='GiB'>120</memory>
    <currentMemory unit='GiB'>120</currentMemory>

    <memoryBacking>
      <hugepages>
        <page size='1' unit='GiB' nodeset='0'/>
        <page size='1' unit='GiB' nodeset='1'/>
      </hugepages>
      <nosharedpages/>
      <locked/>
    </memoryBacking>

  * virsh define guest.xml
  * virsh start guest.xml
  * Without the fix, the following error will be raised and the guest
  will not start.

  root at buneary:/home/ubuntu# virsh start reproducer2
  error: Failed to start domain reproducer2
  error: internal error: process exited while connecting to monitor: mlockall: Cannot allocate memory
  2017-08-11T03:59:54.936275Z qemu-system-x86_64: locking memory failed

  * With the fix, the error shouldn't be displayed and the guest started

  [Suggested Fix]

  *
  https://github.com/libvirt/libvirt/commit/7e667664d28f90bf6916604a55ebad7e2d85305b
  (Proposed)

  
  [Regression Potential] 

   * There is one (theoretical) thing to think of - the change increases  
     the lock resource limits for the spawned qemu. Maybe that could be 
     used as an attack. Fortunately  the defnition does have neither 
     locked nor hugepages by default so opt-in, and while the guest can 
     do all kind of things when exploited it can only hardly change it's 
     (virtual) physical memory to increase what the host might be locking. 
     Yet worth to mention IMHO

   * The general regression is rather low as I said "locked" is not 
     default and the code path is only affecting domains configured that 
     way. That makes the change rather safe for the overall user - and the 
     one using locked likely need it.

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