CVE-2025-40181

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

x86/kvm: Force legacy PCI hole to UC when overriding MTRRs for TDX/SNP

When running as an SNP or TDX guest under KVM, force the legacy PCI hole, i.e. memory between Top of Lower Usable DRAM and 4GiB, to be mapped as UC via a forced variable MTRR range.

In most KVM-based setups, legacy devices such as the HPET and TPM are enumerated via ACPI. ACPI enumeration includes a Memory32Fixed entry, and optionally a SystemMemory descriptor for an OperationRegion, e.g. if the device needs to be accessed via a Control Method.

If a SystemMemory entry is present, then the kernel's ACPI driver will auto-ioremap the region so that it can be accessed at will. However, the ACPI spec doesn't provide a way to enumerate the memory type of SystemMemory regions, i.e. there's no way to tell software that a region must be mapped as UC vs. WB, etc. As a result, Linux's ACPI driver always maps SystemMemory regions using ioremap_cache(), i.e. as WB on x86.

The dedicated device drivers however, e.g. the HPET driver and TPM driver, want to map their associated memory as UC or WC, as accessing PCI devices using WB is unsupported.

On bare metal and non-CoCO, the conflicting requirements "work" as firmware configures the PCI hole (and other device memory) to be UC in the MTRRs. So even though the ACPI mappings request WB, they are forced to UC- in the kernel's tracking due to the kernel properly handling the MTRR overrides, and thus are compatible with the drivers' requested WC/UC-.

With force WB MTRRs on SNP and TDX guests, the ACPI mappings get their requested WB if the ACPI mappings are established before the dedicated driver code attempts to initialize the device. E.g. if acpi_init() runs before the corresponding device driver is probed, ACPI's WB mapping will "win", and result in the driver's ioremap() failing because the existing WB mapping isn't compatible with the requested WC/UC-.

E.g. when a TPM is emulated by the hypervisor (ignoring the security implications of relying on what is allegedly an untrusted entity to store measurements), the TPM driver will request UC and fail:

[ 1.730459] ioremap error for 0xfed40000-0xfed45000, requested 0x2, got 0x0 [ 1.732780] tpm_tis MSFT0101:00: probe with driver tpm_tis failed with error -12

Note, the '0x2' and '0x0' values refer to "enum page_cache_mode", not x86's memtypes (which frustratingly are an almost pure inversion; 2 == WB, 0 == UC). E.g. tracing mapping requests for TPM TIS yields: