Re: [PATCH 7/8] x86, microcode, intel: guard against misaligned microcode data

Henrique de Moraes Holschuh
2014-11-11T19:54:14Z

On Tue, 11 Nov 2014, Borislav Petkov wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 02:57:31PM -0200, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> > Meh, I don't know where I came up with the wrong information that kmalloc
> > aligned to 16-bytes instead of 8 bytes.
> >
> > I do wonder why I didn't hit this while testing, though. Maybe an artifact
> > of slub, or just my luck that I never got a memory block that was not
> > aligned to 16 bytes.
>
> The ARCH_KMALLOC_MINALIGN is conditioned on ARCH_DMA_MINALIGN and a
> bunch of other things. All I'm saying is, this needs a careful study
> when, if at all, kmalloc will not give an 16-byte aligned buffer.

I tried to do that in order to answer my own question. After a quick look,
it looks like it ends up being an implementation detail of SLUB/SLAB/SLOB,
and it depends on the size of the object being allocated (i.e. if it is
bigger than KMALLOC_MAX_CACHE_SIZE).

I was always getting page-aligned memory blocks out of kmalloc() in my
testing because of that.

It won't be an ugly fix anyway, something like this (conceptual code):

/* as required by Intel SDM blahblahblah */
#define INTEL_MICROCODE_MINALIGN 16
#define INTEL_UCODE_PTR(x) PTR_ALIGN(x, INTEL_MICROCODE_MINALIGN)

void *intel_ucode_kmalloc(size_t size)
{
void *p = kmalloc(size, GFP_KERNEL);
if (likely(p == INTEL_UCODE_PTR(p))
return p;

kfree(p);
return kmalloc(size + INTEL_MICROCODE_MINALIGN - 1, GFP_KERNEL);
}

For most users, that "p == INTEL_UCODE_PTR(p)" will always be true (SLUB
alocator, and microcode size >= 4096).

This way, we don't go around wasting pages when the microcode size is large
enough for the allocation to get kicked directly to the page allocator and
it is also is a multiple of PAGE_SIZE (which it often is).

I will need to add some defense against (size + 15) overflow in that custom
kmalloc, or ensure that we refuse ridiculously large microcode early (say,
larger than 4MiB). Not a big deal, we probably already do this, and if we
don't, it will be an worthwhile enhancement by itself. The largest
microcode I have been made aware of is ~64KiB.

--
"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
Henrique Holschuh