[PATCH v15 41/41] KVM: VMX: Make CR4.CET a guest owned bit

Sean Christopherson
2025-09-12T23:24:38Z

From: Mathias Krause <minipli@grsecurity.net>

Make CR4.CET a guest-owned bit under VMX by extending
KVM_POSSIBLE_CR4_GUEST_BITS accordingly.

There's no need to intercept changes to CR4.CET, as it's neither
included in KVM's MMU role bits, nor does KVM specifically care about
the actual value of a (nested) guest's CR4.CET value, beside for
enforcing architectural constraints, i.e. make sure that CR0.WP=1 if
CR4.CET=1.

Intercepting writes to CR4.CET is particularly bad for grsecurity
kernels with KERNEXEC or, even worse, KERNSEAL enabled. These features
heavily make use of read-only kernel objects and use a cpu-local CR0.WP
toggle to override it, when needed. Under a CET-enabled kernel, this
also requires toggling CR4.CET, hence the motivation to make it
guest-owned.

Using the old test from [1] gives the following runtime numbers (perf
stat -r 5 ssdd 10 50000):

* grsec guest on linux-6.16-rc5 + cet patches:
2.4647 +- 0.0706 seconds time elapsed ( +- 2.86% )

* grsec guest on linux-6.16-rc5 + cet patches + CR4.CET guest-owned:
1.5648 +- 0.0240 seconds time elapsed ( +- 1.53% )

Not only does not intercepting CR4.CET make the test run ~35% faster,
it's also more stable with less fluctuation due to fewer VMEXITs.

Therefore, make CR4.CET a guest-owned bit where possible.

This change is VMX-specific, as SVM has no such fine-grained control
register intercept control.

If KVM's assumptions regarding MMU role handling wrt. a guest's CR4.CET
value ever change, the BUILD_BUG_ON()s related to KVM_MMU_CR4_ROLE_BITS
and KVM_POSSIBLE_CR4_GUEST_BITS will catch that early.

Link: https://lore.kernel.org/kvm/20230322013731.102955-1-minipli@grsecurity.net/ [1]
Reviewed-by: Chao Gao <chao.gao@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Mathias Krause <minipli@grsecurity.net>
Signed-off-by: Sean Christopherson <seanjc@google.com>
---
arch/x86/kvm/kvm_cache_regs.h | 3 ++-
1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/arch/x86/kvm/kvm_cache_regs.h b/arch/x86/kvm/kvm_cache_regs.h
index 36a8786db291..8ddb01191d6f 100644
--- a/arch/x86/kvm/kvm_cache_regs.h
+++ b/arch/x86/kvm/kvm_cache_regs.h
@@ -7,7 +7,8 @@
#define KVM_POSSIBLE_CR0_GUEST_BITS (X86_CR0_TS | X86_CR0_WP)
#define KVM_POSSIBLE_CR4_GUEST_BITS \
(X86_CR4_PVI | X86_CR4_DE | X86_CR4_PCE | X86_CR4_OSFXSR \
- | X86_CR4_OSXMMEXCPT | X86_CR4_PGE | X86_CR4_TSD | X86_CR4_FSGSBASE)
+ | X86_CR4_OSXMMEXCPT | X86_CR4_PGE | X86_CR4_TSD | X86_CR4_FSGSBASE \
+ | X86_CR4_CET)

#define X86_CR0_PDPTR_BITS (X86_CR0_CD | X86_CR0_NW | X86_CR0_PG)
#define X86_CR4_TLBFLUSH_BITS (X86_CR4_PGE | X86_CR4_PCIDE | X86_CR4_PAE | X86_CR4_SMEP)
--
2.51.0.384.g4c02a37b29-goog