Re: Rethinking sigcontext's xfeatures slightly for PKRU's benefit?

[Dave Hansen]

On 06/30/2016 10:36 AM, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
>>> We make baseline_pkru a process-wide baseline and store it in
>>> mm->context.  That way, no matter which thread gets interrupted for a
>>> signal, they see consistent values.  We only write to it when an app
>>> _specifically_ asks for it to be updated with a special flag to
>>> sys_pkey_set().
>>>
>>> When an app uses the execute-only support, we implicitly set the
>>> read-disable bit in baseline_pkru for the execute-only pkey.
...
> Looking at your git tree, which I assume is a reasonably approximation
> of your current patches, this seems to be unimplemented.  I, at least,
> would be nervous about using PKRU for protection of critical data if
> signal handlers are unconditionally exempt.

I actually went along and implemented this using an extra 'flag' for
pkey_get/set().  I just left it out of this stage since I'm having
enough problems getting it in with the existing set of features. :)

I'm confident we can add this later with the flags we can pass to
pkey_get() and pkey_set().

> Also, the lazily allocated no-read key for execute-only is done in the
> name of performance, but it results in odd semantics.  How much of a
> performance win is preserving the init optimization of PKRU in
> practice?  (I.e. how much faster are XSAVE and XRSTOR?)  I can't test
> because even my Skylake laptop doesn't have PKRU.

This is admittedly not the most realistic benchmark because everything
is cache-warm, but I ran Ingo's FPU "measure.c" code on XSAVES/XRSTORS.
This runs things in pretty tight loops where everything is cache hot.

The XSAVE instructions are monsters and I'm not super-confident in my
measurements, but I'm seeing in the neighborhood of XSAVES/XRSTORS
getting 20-30 cycles when PKRU is in play vs. not.  This is with
completely cache-hot data, though.