Re: [PATCH] x86/vdso: Remove direct HPET access through the vDSO

[Borislav Petkov]

On Thu, Apr 07, 2016 at 05:16:59PM -0700, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> Allowing user code to map the HPET is problematic.  HPET
> implementations are notoriously buggy, and there are probably many
> machines on which even MMIO reads from bogus HPET addresses are
> problematic.
> 
> We have a report that the Dell Precision M2800 with:
> 
> ACPI: HPET 0x00000000C8FE6238 000038 (v01 DELL   CBX3  01072009 AMI. 00000005)
> 
> is either so slow when accessing the HPET or actually hangs in some
> regard, causing soft lockups to be reported if users do unexpected
> things to the HPET.
> 
> The vclock HPET code has also always been a questionable speedup.
> Accessing an HPET is exceedingly slow (on the order of several
> microseconds), so the added overhead in requiring a syscall to read
> the HPET is a small fraction of the total code of accessing it.
> 
> To avoid future problems, let's just delete the code entirely.
> 
> In the long run, this could actually be a speedup.  Waiman Long as a
> patch to optimize the case where multiple CPUs contend for the HPET,
> but that won't help unless all the accesses are mediated by the
> kernel.
> 
> Cc: Waiman Long <waiman.long@xxxxxxx>
> Reported-by: Rasmus Villemoes <linux@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Signed-off-by: Andy Lutomirski <luto@xxxxxxxxxx>
> ---
>  arch/x86/entry/vdso/vclock_gettime.c  | 15 ---------------
>  arch/x86/entry/vdso/vdso-layout.lds.S |  5 ++---
>  arch/x86/entry/vdso/vma.c             | 11 -----------
>  arch/x86/include/asm/clocksource.h    |  9 ++++-----
>  arch/x86/kernel/hpet.c                |  1 -
>  arch/x86/kvm/trace.h                  |  3 +--
>  6 files changed, 7 insertions(+), 37 deletions(-)

I like diffstats which remove more lines than add :)

In any case, I'm not well versed in the vdso game but from my experience
so far, I'm starting to believe that the 'H' in HPET stands for
Horrific. So the less people get exposed to it, the better.

A question though: userspace does not rely on the hpet page being always
present and can do fallback. IOW, we're not breaking any existing
usages, right?

-- 
Regards/Gruss,
    Boris.

ECO tip #101: Trim your mails when you reply.