Re: [PATCH v3 1/1] x86/mce/amd: Guard SMCA DESTAT access on non-SMCA machines

[William Roche]

On 3/17/26 21:24, Borislav Petkov wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 17, 2026 at 09:06:54PM +0100, William Roche wrote:
> > Relaying the error to the guest doesn't only have a value to target a VM
> > process but also deal with free memory or clean file cache memory impacted
> > etc... Cases where a memory error may not crash the kernel can benefit to
> > the VM too
>
> I don't understand - what do you mean with "free memory or clean file cache
> memory"?

The physical address of an uncorrected memory error (if/when it can be 
identified) can give a chance to a kernel reaction depending on the 
state (and type) of the impacted memory -- as implemented in 
mm/memory-failure.c with error_states[], me_pagecache_clean() or 
try_memory_failure()...

The Kernel can try to "deal" with the error. The process case (with its 
SIGBUS) is probably the most common one, but a few kernel memory pages 
impacted by a memory error could be isolated (poisoned) without 
requiring a kernel crash. Free memory pages or clean page cache pages 
could be an example of that, they are poisoned and should not be used by 
the system after that. The kernel can also return EIO error on poisoned 
page cache failed access attempt, etc...

These mechanisms are implemented for the bare-metal running kernel, but 
what is really interesting when relaying the error to a VM is that its 
kernel can, in some cases, also benefit from these mechanisms. And 
having a chance (even small) to avoid a VM crash is a significant gain 
for virtualized workload.

Just giving my point of view on why we care about VM relayed memory 
errors :)

William.