On Mon, Mar 02, 2026 at 08:04:22PM +0100, Alexander Graf wrote:
On 02.03.26 17:25, Stefano Garzarella wrote:
On Mon, Mar 02, 2026 at 04:48:33PM +0100, Alexander Graf wrote:
On 02.03.26 13:06, Stefano Garzarella wrote:
CCing Bryan, Vishnu, and Broadcom list.
On Mon, Mar 02, 2026 at 12:47:05PM +0100, Stefano Garzarella wrote:
Please target net-next tree for this new feature.
On Mon, Mar 02, 2026 at 10:41:38AM +0000, Alexander Graf wrote:
Vsock maintains a single CID number space which can be used to
communicate to the host (G2H) or to a child-VM (H2G). The
current logic
trivially assumes that G2H is only relevant for CID <= 2
because these
target the hypervisor. However, in environments like Nitro
Enclaves, an
instance that hosts vhost_vsock powered VMs may still want
to communicate
to Enclaves that are reachable at higher CIDs through
virtio-vsock-pci.
That means that for CID > 2, we really want an overlay. By
default, all
CIDs are owned by the hypervisor. But if vhost registers a
CID, it takes
precedence. Implement that logic. Vhost already knows which CIDs it
supports anyway.
With this logic, I can run a Nitro Enclave as well as a
nested VM with
vhost-vsock support in parallel, with the parent instance able to
communicate to both simultaneously.
I honestly don't understand why VMADDR_FLAG_TO_HOST (added
specifically for Nitro IIRC) isn't enough for this scenario
and we have to add this change. Can you elaborate a bit more
about the relationship between this change and
VMADDR_FLAG_TO_HOST we added?
The main problem I have with VMADDR_FLAG_TO_HOST for connect() is
that it punts the complexity to the user. Instead of a single CID
address space, you now effectively create 2 spaces: One for
TO_HOST (needs a flag) and one for TO_GUEST (no flag). But every
user space tool needs to learn about this flag. That may work for
super special-case applications. But propagating that all the way
into socat, iperf, etc etc? It's just creating friction.
Okay, I would like to have this (or part of it) in the commit
message to better explain why we want this change.
IMHO the most natural experience is to have a single CID space,
potentially manually segmented by launching VMs of one kind within
a certain range.
I see, but at this point, should the kernel set VMADDR_FLAG_TO_HOST
in the remote address if that path is taken "automagically" ?
So in that way the user space can have a way to understand if it's
talking with a nested guest or a sibling guest.
That said, I'm concerned about the scenario where an application
does not even consider communicating with a sibling VM.
If that's really a realistic concern, then we should add a
VMADDR_FLAG_TO_GUEST that the application can set. Default behavior of
an application that provides no flags is "route to whatever you can
find": If vhost is loaded, it routes to vhost. If a vsock backend
mmm, we have always documented this simple behavior:
- CID = 2 talks to the host
- CID >= 3 talks to the guest
Now we are changing this by adding fallback. I don't think we should
change the default behavior, but rather provide new ways to enable this
new behavior.
I find it strange that an application running on Linux 7.0 has a default
behavior where using CID=42 always talks to a nested VM, but starting
with Linux 7.1, it also starts talking to a sibling VM.
driver is loaded, it routes there. But the application has no say in
where it goes: It's purely a system configuration thing.
This is true for complex things like IP, but for VSOCK we have always
wanted to keep the default behavior very simple (as written above).
Everything else must be explicitly enabled IMHO.
Until now, it knew that by not setting that flag, it could only talk
to nested VMs, so if there was no VM with that CID, the connection
simply failed. Whereas from this patch onwards, if the device in the
host supports sibling VMs and there is a VM with that CID, the
application finds itself talking to a sibling VM instead of a nested
one, without having any idea.
I'd say an application that attempts to talk to a CID that it does now
know whether it's vhost routed or not is running into "undefined"
territory. If you rmmod the vhost driver, it would also talk to the
hypervisor provided vsock.
Oh, I missed that. And I also fixed that behaviour with commit
65b422d9b61b ("vsock: forward all packets to the host when no H2G is
registered") after I implemented the multi-transport support.
mmm, this could change my position ;-) (although, to be honest, I don't
understand why it was like that in the first place, but that's how it is
now).
Please document also this in the new commit message, is a good point.
Although when H2G is loaded, we behave differently. However, it is true
that sysctl helps us standardize this behavior.
I don't know whether to see it as a regression or not.
Should we make this feature opt-in in some way, such as sockopt or
sysctl? (I understand that there is the previous problem, but
honestly, it seems like a significant change to the behavior of
AF_VSOCK).
We can create a sysctl to enable behavior with default=on. But I'm
against making the cumbersome does-not-work-out-of-the-box experience
the default. Will include it in v2.
The opposite point of view is that we would not want to have different
default behavior between 7.0 and 7.1 when H2G is loaded.
At the end of the day, the host vs guest problem is super similar
to a routing table.
Yeah, but the point of AF_VSOCK is precisely to avoid complexities
such as routing tables as much as possible; otherwise, AF_INET is
already there and ready to be used. In theory, we only want
communication between host and guest.
Yes, but nesting is a thing and nobody thought about it :). In
retrospect, it would have been to annotate the CID with the direction:
H5 goes to CID5 on host and G5 goes to CID5 on guest. But I see no
chance to change that by now.
Yep, this is why we added the VMADDR_FLAG_TO_HOST.
Stefano
