x86: SHADOW_PAGING is deprecated

Addressing certain issues, in particular related to operations which may
take excessively long and therefore would need preemption, has turned out
overly costly. Since alternatives (HVM/PVH: HAP, PV: shim) are commonly
available, the decision was to deprecate the functionality, while still
retaining it for people to use at their own (security) risk. Memory-wise
small enough guests may still be okay to run.

Some CI testing depends on SHADOW_PAGING.  Explicitly enable it when needed.

This is CVE-2026-42493 / XSA-495.

Signed-off-by: Jan Beulich <jbeulich@suse.com>
Reviewed-by: Juergen Gross <jgross@suse.com>
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Jan Beulich authored and Andrew Cooper committed 2026-07-28 12:40:10 +01:00
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@@ -366,6 +366,16 @@ This is typically done by a guest kernel agent known as a "balloon driver".
Status: Supported
### Shadow paging
Allows fully virtualized guests (HVM / PVH) to be run without (host side) page
translation support by hardware (AMD: NPT, Intel: EPT).
It is also required to migrate PV guests, and to allow L1TF-vulnerable guests
to continue to run without compromising host security.
Status: Supported, not security supported
### Populate-on-demand memory
This is a mechanism that allows normal operating systems with only a balloon driver
@@ -498,7 +508,7 @@ This feature is independent
of the ARM "page granularity" feature (see below).
Status, x86 HVM/PVH, HAP: Supported
Status, x86 HVM/PVH, Shadow, 2MiB: Supported
Status, x86 HVM/PVH, Shadow, 2MiB: Supported, not security supported
Status, ARM: Supported
On x86 in shadow mode, only 2MiB (L2) superpages are available;
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