Re: [PATCH stable v4.9 v2] arm64: entry: Place an SB sequence following an ERET instruction

[Florian Fainelli]

On 8/24/2020 9:32 AM, Will Deacon wrote:
> Hi Florian,
>
> On Fri, Aug 21, 2020 at 10:16:23AM -0700, Florian Fainelli wrote:
> > On 8/21/20 9:03 AM, Will Deacon wrote:
> > > On Fri, Aug 07, 2020 at 03:14:29PM +0200, Greg KH wrote:
> > > > On Thu, Aug 06, 2020 at 01:00:54PM -0700, Florian Fainelli wrote:
> > > > > Greg, did you have a chance to queue those changes for 4.9, 4.14 and 4.19?
> > > > >
> > > > > https://lore.kernel.org/linux-arm-kernel/20200720182538.13304-1-f.fainelli@xxxxxxxxx/
> > > > > https://lore.kernel.org/linux-arm-kernel/20200720182937.14099-1-f.fainelli@xxxxxxxxx/
> > > > > https://lore.kernel.org/linux-arm-kernel/20200709195034.15185-1-f.fainelli@xxxxxxxxx/
> > > >
> > > > Nope, I was waiting for Will's "ack" for these.
> > >
> > > This patch doesn't even build for me (the 'sb' macro is not defined in 4.9),
> > > and I really wonder why we bother backporting it at all. Nobody's ever shown
> > > it to be a problem in practice, and it's clear that this is just being
> > > submitted to tick a box rather than anything else (otherwise it would build,
> > > right?).
> >
> > Doh, I completely missed submitting the patch this depended on that's
> > why I did not notice the build failure locally, sorry about that, what a
> > shame.
> >
> > Would not be the same "tick a box" argument be used against your
> > original submission then? Sure, I have not been able to demonstrate in
> > real life this was a problem, however the same can be said about a lot
> > security related fixes.
>
> Sort of, although I wrote the original patch because it was dead easy to do
> and saved having to think too much about the problem, whereas the complexity
> of backporting largerly diminishes that imo.
>
> > What if it becomes exploitable in the future, would not it be nice to
> > have it in a 6 year LTS kernel?
>
> Even if people are stuck on an old LTS, they should still be taking the
> regular updates for it, and we would obviously need to backport the fix if
> it turned out to be exploitable (and hey, we could even test it then!).
>
> > > So I'm not going to Ack any of them. As with a lot of this side-channel
> > > stuff the cure is far worse than the disease.
> > Assuming that my v3 does build correctly, which it will, would you be
> > keen on changing your position?
>
> Note that I'm not trying to block this patch from going in, I'm just saying
> that I'm not supportive of it. Perhaps somebody from Arm can review it if
> they think it's worth the effort.

How about I submit the actual full series (two patches) and we take the 
discussion from there?

Thanks for responding!
--
Florian