Re: [PATCH] ARM: spectre-v2: Try to set IBE bit for Cortex-A15 and Brahma-B15

[Marek Vasut]

On 06/08/2018 12:58 AM, Florian Fainelli wrote:
> Per the ARM reference manual for the Cortex-A15, The ACTLR:
> 
>  Is a read/write register.
> 
>  Common to the Secure and Non-secure states.
> 
>  Is only accessible from PL1 or higher, with access rights that depend
>  on the mode:
> 
>     * Read/write in Secure PL1 modes.
> 
>     * Read-only and write-ignored in Non-secure PL1 and PL2 modes
>       if NSACR.NS_SMP is 0.
> 
>     * Read/write in Non-secure PL1 and PL2 modes if NSACR.NS_SMP
>       is 1. In this case, all bits are write-ignored except for the SMP bit.
> 
> We can attempt to set this bit from within the kernel, which helps
> avoiding firmware side modifications to set the IBE bit when that is
> impractical. We do this within __v7_ca15mp_setup and __v7_b15mp_setup
> because by then we already took those labels because the processors we
> run on do match.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Florian Fainelli <f.fainelli@xxxxxxxxx>

I believe this would help on selected R-Car Gen2 SoCs which have CA15
cores. Those cores are released from reset by Linux directly and jump to
the reset vector set up by Linux in Secure mode.

I was looking for a generic solution after discussing how to mitigate
the spectrev2 on such SoCs with Catalin on IRC and this seems to be one
option. There was also a suggestion that Russell is working on some sort
of generic solution too. Can you comment on that please ?

> ---
>  arch/arm/mm/proc-v7.S | 8 +++++++-
>  1 file changed, 7 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
> 
> diff --git a/arch/arm/mm/proc-v7.S b/arch/arm/mm/proc-v7.S
> index 6fe52819e014..a21cf3729efa 100644
> --- a/arch/arm/mm/proc-v7.S
> +++ b/arch/arm/mm/proc-v7.S
> @@ -284,10 +284,16 @@ __v7_cr8mp_setup:
>  	b	1f
>  __v7_ca7mp_setup:
>  __v7_ca12mp_setup:
> +	b	2f
>  __v7_ca15mp_setup:
>  __v7_b15mp_setup:
> +#ifdef CONFIG_HARDEN_BRANCH_PREDICTOR
> +	mrc	p15, 0, r0, c1, c0, 1
> +	orr	r0, r0, #1			@ Enable IBE bit
> +	mcr	p15, 0, r0, c1, c0, 1
> +#endif
>  __v7_ca17mp_setup:
> -	mov	r10, #0
> +2:	mov	r10, #0
>  1:	adr	r0, __v7_setup_stack_ptr
>  	ldr	r12, [r0]
>  	add	r12, r12, r0			@ the local stack
> 


-- 
Best regards,
Marek Vasut