spapr: Simplify handling of host-serial and host-model values

27461d69a0f "ppc: add host-serial and host-model machine attributes
(CVE-2019-8934)" introduced 'host-serial' and 'host-model' machine
properties for spapr to explicitly control the values advertised to the
guest in device tree properties with the same names.

The previous behaviour on KVM was to unconditionally populate the device
tree with the real host serial number and model, which leaks possibly
sensitive information about the host to the guest.

To maintain compatibility for old machine types, we allowed those props
to be set to "passthrough" to take the value from the host as before.  Or
they could be set to "none" to explicitly omit the device tree items.

Special casing specific values on what's otherwise a user supplied string
is very ugly.  So, this patch simplifies things by implementing the
backwards compatibility in a different way: we have a machine class flag
set for the older machines, and we only load the host values into the
device tree if A) they're not set by the user and B) we have that flag set.

This does mean that the "passthrough" functionality is no longer available
with the current machine type.  That's ok though: if a user or management
layer really wants the information passed through they can read it
themselves (OpenStack Nova already does something similar for x86).

It also means the user can't explicitly ask for the values to be omitted
on the old machine types.  I think that's an acceptable trade-off: if you
care enough about not leaking the host information you can either move to
the new machine type, or use a dummy value for the properties.

For the new machine type, this also removes an odd inconsistency
between running on a POWER and non-POWER (or non-Linux) hosts: if the
host information couldn't be read from where we expect (in the host's
device tree as exposed by Linux), we'd fallback to omitting the guest
device tree items.

While we're there, improve some poorly worded comments, and the help text
for the properties.

Signed-off-by: David Gibson <david@gibson.dropbear.id.au>
Reviewed-by: Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Greg Kurz <groug@kaod.org>
Tested-by: Greg Kurz <groug@kaod.org>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions