Re: [RFC 04/10] x86/mm: Only flush indirect branches when switching into non dumpable process

[Woodhouse, David]

On Sat, 2018-01-20 at 20:22 +0100, KarimAllah Ahmed wrote:
> From: Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

I think this is probably From: Andi now rather than From: Tim?

We do need the series this far in order to have a full retpoline-based
mitigation, and I'd like to see that go in sooner rather than later.
There's a little more discussion to be had about the IBRS parts which
come later in the series (and the final one or two which weren't posted
yet).

I think this is the one patch of the "we want this now" IBPB set that
we expect serious debate on, which is why it's still a separate
"optimisation" patch on top of the previous one which just does IBPB
unconditionally.


> Flush indirect branches when switching into a process that marked
> itself non dumpable.ÂÂThis protects high value processes like gpg
> better, without having too high performance overhead.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen <ak@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Signed-off-by: David Woodhouse <dwmw@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Signed-off-by: KarimAllah Ahmed <karahmed@xxxxxxxxx>
> ---
> Âarch/x86/mm/tlb.c | 13 ++++++++++++-
> Â1 file changed, 12 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
> 
> diff --git a/arch/x86/mm/tlb.c b/arch/x86/mm/tlb.c
> index 304de7d..f64e80c 100644
> --- a/arch/x86/mm/tlb.c
> +++ b/arch/x86/mm/tlb.c
> @@ -225,8 +225,19 @@ void switch_mm_irqs_off(struct mm_struct *prev, struct mm_struct *next,
> Â		Â* Avoid user/user BTB poisoning by flushing the branch predictor
> Â		Â* when switching between processes. This stops one process from
> Â		Â* doing Spectre-v2 attacks on another.
> +		Â*
> +		Â* As an optimization: Flush indirect branches only when
> +		Â* switching into processes that disable dumping.
> +		Â*
> +		Â* This will not flush when switching into kernel threads.
> +		Â* But it would flush when switching into idle and back
> +		Â*
> +		Â* It might be useful to have a one-off cache here
> +		Â* to also not flush the idle case, but we would need some
> +		Â* kind of stable sequence number to remember the previous mm.
> Â		Â*/
> -		indirect_branch_prediction_barrier();
> +		if (tsk && tsk->mm && get_dumpable(tsk->mm) != SUID_DUMP_USER)
> +			indirect_branch_prediction_barrier();
> Â
> Â		if (IS_ENABLED(CONFIG_VMAP_STACK)) {
> Â			/*

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