[RFC PATCH 0/3] x86/mm/tlb: Defer TLB flushes with PTI

From: Nadav Amit
Date: Sat Aug 24 2019 - 02:07:24 EST


INVPCID is considerably slower than INVLPG of a single PTE, but it is
currently used to flush PTEs in the user page-table when PTI is used.

Instead, it is possible to defer TLB flushes until after the user
page-tables are loaded. Preventing speculation over the TLB flushes
should keep the whole thing safe. In some cases, deferring TLB flushes
in such a way can result in more full TLB flushes, but arguably this
behavior is oftentimes beneficial.

These patches are based and evaluated on top of the concurrent
TLB-flushes v4 patch-set.

I will provide more results later, but it might be easier to look at the
time an isolated TLB flush takes. These numbers are from skylake,
showing the number of cycles that running madvise(DONTNEED) which
results in local TLB flushes takes:

n_pages concurrent +deferred-pti change
------- ---------- ------------- ------
1 2119 1986 -6.7%
10 6791 5417 -20%

Please let me know if I missed something that affects security or
performance.

[ Yes, I know there is another pending RFC for async TLB flushes, but I
think it might be easier to merge this one first ]

Nadav Amit (3):
x86/mm/tlb: Defer PTI flushes
x86/mm/tlb: Avoid deferring PTI flushes on shootdown
x86/mm/tlb: Use lockdep irq assertions

arch/x86/entry/calling.h | 52 +++++++++++++++++++--
arch/x86/include/asm/tlbflush.h | 31 ++++++++++--
arch/x86/kernel/asm-offsets.c | 3 ++
arch/x86/mm/tlb.c | 83 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++--
4 files changed, 158 insertions(+), 11 deletions(-)

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2.17.1