Re: [PATCH 2/2] arm64: errata: Add Cortex-A520 speculative unprivileged load workaround

[Will Deacon]

On Tue, Sep 12, 2023 at 07:11:15AM -0500, Rob Herring wrote:
> Implement the workaround for ARM Cortex-A520 erratum 2966298. On an
> affected Cortex-A520 core, a speculatively executed unprivileged load
> might leak data from a privileged level via a cache side channel.
> 
> The workaround is to execute a TLBI before returning to EL0. A
> non-shareable TLBI to any address is sufficient.

Can you elaborate at all on how this works, please? A TLBI addressing a
cache side channel feels weird (or is "cache" referring to some TLB
structures rather than e.g. the data cache here?).

Assuming there's some vulnerable window between the speculative
unprivileged load and the completion of the TLBI, what prevents another
CPU from observing the side-channel during that time? Also, does the
TLBI need to be using the same ASID as the unprivileged load? If so, then
a context-switch could widen the vulnerable window quite significantly.

Anyway, hopefully I'm barking up the wrong tree, but it would be helpful
to have some intuition behind the workaround in order to review (and
maintain) this patch.

Cheers,

Will