Re: [PATCH v6 00/10] Retpoline: Avoid speculative indirect calls in kernel

[Dr. David Alan Gilbert]

* Woodhouse, David (dwmw@xxxxxxxxxxxx) wrote:
> On Mon, 2018-01-08 at 02:42 -0800, Paul Turner wrote:
> > 
> > While the cases above involve the crafting and use of poisoned
> > entries.  Recall also that one of the initial conditions was that we
> > should avoid RSB underflow as some CPUs may try to use other indirect
> > predictors when this occurs.
> 
> I think we should start by deliberately ignoring the CPUs which use the
> other indirect predictors on RSB underflow. Those CPUs don't perform
> *quite* so badly with IBRS anyway.
> 
> Let's get the minimum amount of RSB handling in to cope with the pre-
> SKL CPUs, and then see if we really do want to extend it to make SKL
> 100% secure in retpoline mode or not.

How do you make decisions on which CPU you're running on?
I'm worried about the case of a VM that starts off on an older host
and then gets live migrated to a new Skylake.
For Intel CPUs we've historically been safe to live migrate
to any newer host based on having all the features that the old one had;
with the guest still seeing the flags etc for the old CPU.

Dave
--
Dr. David Alan Gilbert / dgilbert@xxxxxxxxxx / Manchester, UK