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authorThomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>2019-02-18 23:04:01 +0100
committerGreg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>2019-05-14 19:19:40 +0200
commit2394f5912c223b767be0c4f8365570335110a8c0 (patch)
treef23ee064a71fc041ba7e8e9d0ed5fe45f56d0a3b /Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt
parent3a8e7f6993c8240f6cc8564ff06702512b3b18bb (diff)
x86/speculation/mds: Conditionally clear CPU buffers on idle entry
commit 07f07f55a29cb705e221eda7894dd67ab81ef343 upstream. Add a static key which controls the invocation of the CPU buffer clear mechanism on idle entry. This is independent of other MDS mitigations because the idle entry invocation to mitigate the potential leakage due to store buffer repartitioning is only necessary on SMT systems. Add the actual invocations to the different halt/mwait variants which covers all usage sites. mwaitx is not patched as it's not available on Intel CPUs. The buffer clear is only invoked before entering the C-State to prevent that stale data from the idling CPU is spilled to the Hyper-Thread sibling after the Store buffer got repartitioned and all entries are available to the non idle sibling. When coming out of idle the store buffer is partitioned again so each sibling has half of it available. Now CPU which returned from idle could be speculatively exposed to contents of the sibling, but the buffers are flushed either on exit to user space or on VMENTER. When later on conditional buffer clearing is implemented on top of this, then there is no action required either because before returning to user space the context switch will set the condition flag which causes a flush on the return to user path. Note, that the buffer clearing on idle is only sensible on CPUs which are solely affected by MSBDS and not any other variant of MDS because the other MDS variants cannot be mitigated when SMT is enabled, so the buffer clearing on idle would be a window dressing exercise. This intentionally does not handle the case in the acpi/processor_idle driver which uses the legacy IO port interface for C-State transitions for two reasons: - The acpi/processor_idle driver was replaced by the intel_idle driver almost a decade ago. Anything Nehalem upwards supports it and defaults to that new driver. - The legacy IO port interface is likely to be used on older and therefore unaffected CPUs or on systems which do not receive microcode updates anymore, so there is no point in adding that. Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> Reviewed-by: Borislav Petkov <bp@suse.de> Reviewed-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org> Reviewed-by: Frederic Weisbecker <frederic@kernel.org> Reviewed-by: Jon Masters <jcm@redhat.com> Tested-by: Jon Masters <jcm@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
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