hyperlight-dev / hyperlight-dev/hyperlight

Make it possible to kill guest execution when running a host function.

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Rust
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Description

Currently, it is not possible to interrupt or cancel execution if the guest is calling a host function. This means that, if the host function hangs, then the call will never return or get cancelled. This gets surfaced, like so:

https://github.com/hyperlight-dev/hyperlight/blob/b9c67fb7450cfebbd47918b979a97cfa447c43be/src/hyperlight_host/src/func/guest_dispatch.rs#L476

**One possible solution**

When running with the seccomp feature on, host functions are wrapped in their own thread like so:

https://github.com/hyperlight-dev/hyperlight/blob/b9c67fb7450cfebbd47918b979a97cfa447c43be/src/hyperlight_host/src/sandbox/host_funcs.rs#L208-L228

You could leverage these threads to cancel execution in the same way we cancel execution in the guest:

https://github.com/hyperlight-dev/hyperlight/blob/b9c67fb7450cfebbd47918b979a97cfa447c43be/src/hyperlight_host/src/hypervisor/hypervisor_handler.rs#L729-L762

Though, this would mean always wrapping host function calls with an extra thread and that might be naive in terms of perf.

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