Re: [RFC PATCH v7 00/16] Add support for eXclusive Page Frame Ownership

[Khalid Aziz]

Thanks for looking this over.

On 1/10/19 4:07 PM, Kees Cook wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 10, 2019 at 1:10 PM Khalid Aziz <khalid.aziz@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> I implemented a solution to reduce performance penalty and
>> that has had large impact. When XPFO code flushes stale TLB entries,
>> it does so for all CPUs on the system which may include CPUs that
>> may not have any matching TLB entries or may never be scheduled to
>> run the userspace task causing TLB flush. Problem is made worse by
>> the fact that if number of entries being flushed exceeds
>> tlb_single_page_flush_ceiling, it results in a full TLB flush on
>> every CPU. A rogue process can launch a ret2dir attack only from a
>> CPU that has dual mapping for its pages in physmap in its TLB. We
>> can hence defer TLB flush on a CPU until a process that would have
>> caused a TLB flush is scheduled on that CPU. I have added a cpumask
>> to task_struct which is then used to post pending TLB flush on CPUs
>> other than the one a process is running on. This cpumask is checked
>> when a process migrates to a new CPU and TLB is flushed at that
>> time. I measured system time for parallel make with unmodified 4.20
>> kernel, 4.20 with XPFO patches before this optimization and then
>> again after applying this optimization. Here are the results:
>>
>> Hardware: 96-core Intel Xeon Platinum 8160 CPU @ 2.10GHz, 768 GB RAM
>> make -j60 all
>>
>> 4.20                            915.183s
>> 4.20+XPFO                       24129.354s      26.366x
>> 4.20+XPFO+Deferred flush        1216.987s        1.330xx
>>
>>
>> Hardware: 4-core Intel Core i5-3550 CPU @ 3.30GHz, 8G RAM
>> make -j4 all
>>
>> 4.20                            607.671s
>> 4.20+XPFO                       1588.646s       2.614x
>> 4.20+XPFO+Deferred flush        794.473s        1.307xx
> 
> Well that's an impressive improvement! Nice work. :)
> 
> (Are the cpumask improvements possible to be extended to other TLB
> flushing needs? i.e. could there be other performance gains with that
> code even for a non-XPFO system?)

It may be usable for other situations as well but I have not given it
any thought yet. I will take a look.

> 
>> 30+% overhead is still very high and there is room for improvement.
>> Dave Hansen had suggested batch updating TLB entries and Tycho had
>> created an initial implementation but I have not been able to get
>> that to work correctly. I am still working on it and I suspect we
>> will see a noticeable improvement in performance with that. In the
>> code I added, I post a pending full TLB flush to all other CPUs even
>> when number of TLB entries being flushed on current CPU does not
>> exceed tlb_single_page_flush_ceiling. There has to be a better way
>> to do this. I just haven't found an efficient way to implemented
>> delayed limited TLB flush on other CPUs.
>>
>> I am not entirely sure if switch_mm_irqs_off() is indeed the right
>> place to perform the pending TLB flush for a CPU. Any feedback on
>> that will be very helpful. Delaying full TLB flushes on other CPUs
>> seems to help tremendously, so if there is a better way to implement
>> the same thing than what I have done in patch 16, I am open to
>> ideas.
> 
> Dave, Andy, Ingo, Thomas, does anyone have time to look this over?
> 
>> Performance with this patch set is good enough to use these as
>> starting point for further refinement before we merge it into main
>> kernel, hence RFC.
>>
>> Since not flushing stale TLB entries creates a false sense of
>> security, I would recommend making TLB flush mandatory and eliminate
>> the "xpfotlbflush" kernel parameter (patch "mm, x86: omit TLB
>> flushing by default for XPFO page table modifications").
> 
> At this point, yes, that does seem to make sense.
> 
>> What remains to be done beyond this patch series:
>>
>> 1. Performance improvements
>> 2. Remove xpfotlbflush parameter
>> 3. Re-evaluate the patch "arm64/mm: Add support for XPFO to swiotlb"
>>    from Juerg. I dropped it for now since swiotlb code for ARM has
>>    changed a lot in 4.20.
>> 4. Extend the patch "xpfo, mm: Defer TLB flushes for non-current
>>    CPUs" to other architectures besides x86.
> 
> This seems like a good plan.
> 
> I've put this series in one of my tree so that 0day will find it and
> grind tests...
> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/kees/linux.git/log/?h=kspp/xpfo/v7

Thanks for doing that!

--
Khalid

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