Re: Avoid speculative indirect calls in kernel

From: Andrea Arcangeli
Date: Mon Jan 08 2018 - 05:28:30 EST


On Fri, Jan 05, 2018 at 10:59:28AM +0100, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> I've seen the insanities which were crammed into the distro kernels, which
> have sysctls and whatever, but at the same time these kernels shipped in a

Debugfs tunables only, there are no sysctl, quoting Greg:

http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180107082026.GA11510@xxxxxxxxx

"It's a debugfs api, it can be changed at any time, to be anything we
want, and all is fine :)"

> haste do not even boot on a specific class of machines. [..]

If you refer to the two efi_64.c and tboot.c corner case boot failures
found over the last weekend those affected upstream 4.15-rc 4.14.12
and all PTI branches in linux-tip too (perhaps less reproducible there
because of differences in old_memmap handling).

I sent you a better version of the efi_64.c fix from Jiri privately
and you still miss the tboot fix in linux-tip so you still got a boot
failure to fix there.

This is incremental with
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/tip.git/log/?h=WIP.x86/pti
where the "Unbreak EFI old_memmap" fix is applied.

I respinned it after doing the more correct fix in this case too (same
as the efi_64.c improvement) while leaving the attribution to the fix
to Dave as he did the hard part.