Re: [RFC PATCH 4/4] x86/TSC: Use RDTSCP

Andy Lutomirski
2018-12-12T18:07:19Z

On Wed, Dec 12, 2018 at 2:08 AM Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Dec 11, 2018 at 06:24:44PM -0800, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> > This makes me nervous, since no one knows what “serializing” means.
>
> Why no one? If you wanna say that X86_FEATURE_LFENCE_SERIALIZING is not
> really telling, so is X86_FEATURE_LFENCE_RDTSC, TBH. :)

You're proving my point, I think. CPUID, IRET, MOV to CR, etc are
"serializing". LFENCE, on many CPUd and depending on MSRs, is a
different kind of serializing. MFENCE is something else. All LOCK
instructions are some kind of barrier, but I don't think anyone calls
them "serializing".

The uaccess users of barrier_nospec() are presumably looking for a
speculation barrier in the sense of "CPU, please don't execute the
code after this until you're sure that this code should be executed
for real and until all inputs are known, not guessed."

The property I want for RDTSC ordering is much weaker: I want it to be
ordered like a load. Imagine that, instead of an on-chip TSC, the TSC
is literally a location in main memory that gets incremented by an
extra dedicated CPU every nanosecond or so. I want users of RDTSC to
work as if they were reading such a location in memory using an
ordinary load. I believe this gives the real desired property that it
should be impossible to observe the TSC going backwards. This is a
much weaker form of serialization.