Re: [PATCH v2] x86/cpu: Fix migration safety with X86_BUG_NULL_SEL

[Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de>]

On Mon, Oct 18, 2021 at 12:10:20PM -0700, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> AFAIK no Intel CPU has ever had that behavior, and always cleared the
> segments; I don't Intel has any plans of supporting such a CPUID bit
> (although I'd certainly be willing to take such a request back to the
> CPU teams on request.)

No need - we can always set or clear a flag on Intel, depending on what
we do.

> That being said, this sounds like an ideal use for the hypervisor CPU
> feature flag.

Yap, it uses it.

> Maybe we should consider a migration hypervisor flag too to explicitly
> tell the kernel not to rely on hardware probing that breaks migration
> in general.

Meh, migration-specific flag calls for all kinds of nasty when each
HV would want different things to happen in the guest, for migration.
And then the patch flood will come. I mean, we already do a bunch of
X86_FEATURE_HYPERVISOR all over the place and apparently it is enough
here too...

> Now, with a CPUID but being introduced, the right thing would be to
> use the CPUID bit as a feature instead of using a bug flag, and add
> whitelisting in the vendor-specific code as applicable.

I guess we can flip all that logic checking X86_BUG_NULL_SEG... it
sounds like a lot of churn to me, though and I don't see a pressing need
for it unless someone is bored and wants to do some kernel patching
exercises but whatever...

-- 
Regards/Gruss,
    Boris.

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