[PATCH] tools: Use synchronous I/O for block devices

[PATCH] tools: Use synchronous I/O for block devices

[Demi Marie Obenour]

CVE-2026-45782 showed that the Cloud Hypervisor asynchronous block I/O
code is far too subtle.  Even the top-level APIs are unsafe, and so bugs
in the block device itself can cause undefined behavior.  In this case,
the undefined behavior was a use-after free that allowed a VM escape.

While the synchronous code still allows safe code to cause undefined
behavior, it is somewhat simpler to reason about and so should be
preferred when performance is not a concern.  Disabling asynchronous I/O
was a mitigation for CVE-2026-45782.

Signed-off-by: Demi Marie Obenour <demiobenour@gmail.com>
---
Upstream contributor Dylan Reid plans to fix the block layer.  However,
its attack surface is still much higher than the synchronous I/O code.

This has not been tested beyond the integration tests.  My test machine
is currently not working, most likely due to the AMDGPU panel
self-refresh bug.
---
 tools/start-vmm/ch.rs  | 2 ++
 tools/start-vmm/lib.rs | 2 ++
 2 files changed, 4 insertions(+)

diff --git a/tools/start-vmm/ch.rs b/tools/start-vmm/ch.rs
index d3ac95ed60db834e20dbd7366908ae45cbdf27a2..239d08e10721170de02ec7da92939597c72e8033 100644
--- a/tools/start-vmm/ch.rs
+++ b/tools/start-vmm/ch.rs
@@ -24,6 +24,8 @@ pub struct ConsoleConfig {
 pub struct DiskConfig {
     pub path: String,
     pub readonly: bool,
+    pub disable_io_uring: bool,
+    pub disable_aio: bool,
 }
 
 #[derive(Serialize)]
diff --git a/tools/start-vmm/lib.rs b/tools/start-vmm/lib.rs
index 1adccc1b76ce24ba0550a3db2aef1b4c8f3c231a..0fa63525eaee2f387456ed6fb9c3649188ab0e7a 100644
--- a/tools/start-vmm/lib.rs
+++ b/tools/start-vmm/lib.rs
@@ -75,6 +75,8 @@ pub fn vm_config(vm_dir: &Path) -> Result<VmConfig, String> {
                     Ok(DiskConfig {
                         path: entry,
                         readonly: true,
+                        disable_io_uring: true,
+                        disable_aio: true,
                     })
                 })
                 .collect::<Result<_, _>>()?,

---
base-commit: 5b3151fd08d1f1e3e166a328449fe6fe5092f316
change-id: 20260507-sync-block-2902b6a635f8

-- 
Sincerely,
Demi Marie Obenour (she/her/hers)

Re: [PATCH] tools: Use synchronous I/O for block devices

[Alyssa Ross]

This patch has been committed as bc2173e7e82a4a16d2254bb247f697cee49962d9,
which can be viewed online at
https://spectrum-os.org/git/spectrum/commit/?id=bc2173e7e82a4a16d2254bb247f697cee49962d9.

This is an automated message.  Send comments/questions/requests to:
Alyssa Ross <hi@alyssa.is>