Re: [PATCH 01/11] media: tm6000: fix potential Spectre variant 1

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Tue, Apr 24, 2018 at 12:36:09PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> 
> Then usespace probes which part of the descr[] array is now in cache and
> from that it can infer the initial out-of-bound value.

Just had a better look at v4l_fill_fmtdesc() and actually read the
comment. The code cannot be compiled as a array because it is big and
sparse. But the log(n) condition tree is a prime candidate for the
branchscope side-channel, which would be able to reconstruct a
significant number of bits of the original value. A denser tree gives
more bits etc.