backends/hostmem-file: Add "rom" property to support VM templating with R/O files

For now, "share=off,readonly=on" would always result in us opening the
file R/O and mmap'ing the opened file MAP_PRIVATE R/O -- effectively
turning it into ROM.

Especially for VM templating, "share=off" is a common use case. However,
that use case is impossible with files that lack write permissions,
because "share=off,readonly=on" will not give us writable RAM.

The sole user of ROM via memory-backend-file are R/O NVDIMMs, but as we
have users (Kata Containers) that rely on the existing behavior --
malicious VMs should not be able to consume COW memory for R/O NVDIMMs --
we cannot change the semantics of "share=off,readonly=on"

So let's add a new "rom" property with on/off/auto values. "auto" is
the default and what most people will use: for historical reasons, to not
change the old semantics, it defaults to the value of the "readonly"
property.

For VM templating, one can now use:
    -object memory-backend-file,share=off,readonly=on,rom=off,...

But we'll disallow:
    -object memory-backend-file,share=on,readonly=on,rom=off,...
because we would otherwise get an error when trying to mmap the R/O file
shared and writable. An explicit error message is cleaner.

We will also disallow for now:
    -object memory-backend-file,share=off,readonly=off,rom=on,...
    -object memory-backend-file,share=on,readonly=off,rom=on,...
It's not harmful, but also not really required for now.

Alternatives that were abandoned:
* Make "unarmed=on" for the NVDIMM set the memory region container
  readonly. We would still see a change of ROM->RAM and possibly run
  into memslot limits with vhost-user. Further, there might be use cases
  for "unarmed=on" that should still allow writing to that memory
  (temporary files, system RAM, ...).
* Add a new "readonly=on/off/auto" parameter for NVDIMMs. Similar issues
  as with "unarmed=on".
* Make "readonly" consume "on/off/file" instead of being a 'bool' type.
  This would slightly changes the behavior of the "readonly" parameter:
  values like true/false (as accepted by a 'bool'type) would no longer be
  accepted.

Message-ID: <20230906120503.359863-4-david@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>

1 files changed, 16 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/qapi/qom.json b/qapi/qom.json
index fa3e88c8e6..c53ef978ff 100644
--- a/qapi/qom.json
+++ b/qapi/qom.json
@@ -668,6 +668,20 @@
 # @readonly: if true, the backing file is opened read-only; if false,
 #     it is opened read-write.  (default: false)
 #
+# @rom: whether to create Read Only Memory (ROM) that cannot be modified
+#       by the VM.  Any write attempts to such ROM will be denied.  Most
+#       use cases want writable RAM instead of ROM.  However, selected use
+#       cases, like R/O NVDIMMs, can benefit from ROM.  If set to 'on',
+#       create ROM; if set to 'off', create writable RAM;  if set to
+#       'auto', the value of the @readonly property is used.  This
+#       property is primarily helpful when we want to have proper RAM in
+#       configurations that would traditionally create ROM before this
+#       property was introduced: VM templating, where we want to open a
+#       file readonly (@readonly set to true) and mark the memory to be
+#       private for QEMU (@share set to false).  For this use case, we need
+#       writable RAM instead of ROM, and want to set this property to 'off'.
+#       (default: auto, since 8.2)
+#
 # Since: 2.1
 ##
 { 'struct': 'MemoryBackendFileProperties',
@@ -677,7 +691,8 @@
             '*discard-data': 'bool',
             'mem-path': 'str',
             '*pmem': { 'type': 'bool', 'if': 'CONFIG_LIBPMEM' },
-            '*readonly': 'bool' } }
+            '*readonly': 'bool',
+            '*rom': 'OnOffAuto' } }
 
 ##
 # @MemoryBackendMemfdProperties: