Re: [PATCH PTI v2 6/6] x86/pti: Put the LDT in its own PGD if PTI is on

[Andy Lutomirski]

On Mon, Dec 11, 2017 at 11:32 AM, Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 12/11/2017 10:40 AM, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
>>> Also, from a high level, this does increase the overhead of KPTI in a
>>> non-trivial way, right?  It costs us three more page table pages per
>>> process allocated at fork() and freed at exit() and a new TLB flush.
>> Yeah, but no one will care.  modify_ldt() is used for DOSEMU, Wine,
>> and really old 32-bit programs.
>
> The heavyweight part of map_ldt_struct() (and unmap) looks to run
> whenever we have KPTI enabled.  I'm missing how it gets avoided for the
> non-DOSEMU cases.

It doesn't get called unless modify_ldt() is used.

>
> I thought there would be a "fast path" where we just use the normal
> clear_LDT() LDT from the cpu_entry_area and don't have to do any of
> this, but I'm missing where that happens.  Do we need a check in
> (un)map_ldt_struct() for !mm->context.ldt?

I'm confused.

if (unlikely(ldt)) {
  do something slowish;
} else {
  clear_LD();
}

>
> Just to make sure I understand this: We now have two places that LDTs
> live in virtual space:
>
> 1. The "plain" one that we get from clear_LDT() which lives in the
>    cpu_entry_area.  (No additional overhead when doing this)
> 2. The new one under the special PGD that's only used for modify_ldt()
>    and is fairly slow.  (plenty of overhead, but nobody cares).

Yes.