The hypervisor contains code to accelerate VGA memory accesses for HVM
guests, when the (virtual) VGA is in "standard" mode. Locking involved
there has an unusual discipline, leaving a lock acquired past the
return from the function that acquired it. This behavior results in a
problem when emulating an instruction with two memory accesses, both of
which touch VGA memory (plus some further constraints which aren't
relevant here). When emulating the 2nd access, the lock that is already
being held would be attempted to be re-acquired, resulting in a
deadlock.
This deadlock was already found when the code was first introduced, but
was analysed incorrectly and the fix was incomplete. Analysis in light
of the new finding cannot find a way to make the existing locking
discipline work.
In staging, this logic has all been removed because it was discovered
to be accidentally disabled since Xen 4.7. Therefore, we are fixing the
locking problem by backporting the removal of most of the feature. Note
that even with the feature disabled, the lock would still be acquired
for any accesses to the VGA MMIO region.
Metrics
Affected Vendors & Products
References
History
Tue, 31 Dec 2024 19:15:00 +0000
Type | Values Removed | Values Added |
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Weaknesses | CWE-667 | |
Metrics |
cvssV3_1
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Thu, 19 Dec 2024 12:45:00 +0000
Type | Values Removed | Values Added |
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References |
|
Thu, 19 Dec 2024 12:15:00 +0000
Type | Values Removed | Values Added |
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Description | The hypervisor contains code to accelerate VGA memory accesses for HVM guests, when the (virtual) VGA is in "standard" mode. Locking involved there has an unusual discipline, leaving a lock acquired past the return from the function that acquired it. This behavior results in a problem when emulating an instruction with two memory accesses, both of which touch VGA memory (plus some further constraints which aren't relevant here). When emulating the 2nd access, the lock that is already being held would be attempted to be re-acquired, resulting in a deadlock. This deadlock was already found when the code was first introduced, but was analysed incorrectly and the fix was incomplete. Analysis in light of the new finding cannot find a way to make the existing locking discipline work. In staging, this logic has all been removed because it was discovered to be accidentally disabled since Xen 4.7. Therefore, we are fixing the locking problem by backporting the removal of most of the feature. Note that even with the feature disabled, the lock would still be acquired for any accesses to the VGA MMIO region. | |
Title | Deadlock in x86 HVM standard VGA handling | |
References |
|
MITRE
Status: PUBLISHED
Assigner: XEN
Published: 2024-12-19T12:00:41.413Z
Updated: 2024-12-31T19:01:43.510Z
Reserved: 2024-09-09T14:43:11.826Z
Link: CVE-2024-45818
Vulnrichment
Updated: 2024-12-19T12:04:41.161Z
NVD
Status : Awaiting Analysis
Published: 2024-12-19T12:15:16.540
Modified: 2024-12-31T19:15:46.603
Link: CVE-2024-45818
Redhat
No data.