Re: [PATCH v2 3/3] x86/pti/64: Remove the SYSCALL64 entry trampoline

Thomas Gleixner
2018-09-07T19:54:21Z

On Wed, 5 Sep 2018, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 4, 2018 at 12:04 AM, Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> wrote:
> > Can we have a few words on why this solution and not this alternative? I
> > mean, you raise the possibility, but then surely you chose not to
> > implement that. Might as well share that with us.
>
> I can give some pros and cons. With the other approach:
>
> - We avoid a pipeline stall.

Which is good.

> - We execute from an extra page and read from another extra page
> during the syscall. (The latter is because we need to use a relative
> addressing mode to find sp1 -- it's the same *cacheline* we'd use
> anyway, but we're accessing it using an alias, so it's an extra TLB
> entry.)

Ok, but is this really an issue with PTI?

> - We use more memory. This would be one page per CPU for a simple
> implementation and 64-ish bytes per CPU or one page per node for a
> more complex implementation.

That's the least interesting argument really.

> - More code complexity.

Ok, but how much complex code is that?

> I'm not convinced this is a good tradeoff.

Well, the real question here is whether this has any advantage vs. the
percpu area exposure?

Thanks,

tglx