[PATCH 0/2] x86/xen: avoid 32-bit writes to PTEs in PV PAE guests

From: Juergen Gross
Date: Mon Aug 20 2018 - 01:15:06 EST


While the hypervisor emulates plain writes to PTEs happily, this is
much slower than issuing a hypercall for PTE modifcations. And writing
a PTE via two 32-bit write instructions (especially when clearing the
PTE) will result in an intermediate L1TF vulnerable PTE.

Writes to PAE PTEs should always be done with 64-bit writes or via
hypercalls.

Juergen Gross (2):
x86/xen: don't write ptes directly in 32-bit PV guests
x86/pae: use 64 bit atomic xchg function in native_ptep_get_and_clear

arch/x86/include/asm/pgtable-3level.h | 14 ++++++++------
arch/x86/xen/mmu_pv.c | 7 +++----
2 files changed, 11 insertions(+), 10 deletions(-)

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2.13.7