Re: [patch 3/3] x86/fpu: Make FPU protection more robust

Jason A. Donenfeld
2022-05-04T15:55:52Z

Hi Thomas,

On Wed, May 04, 2022 at 05:36:38PM +0200, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> But the only use case which utilizes FPU from hard interrupt context is
> the random generator via add_randomness_...().
>
> I did a benchmark of these functions, which invoke blake2s_update()
> three times in a row, on a SKL-X and a ZEN3. The generic code and the
> FPU accelerated code are pretty much on par vs. execution time of the
> algorithm itself plus/minus noise.
>
> IOW, using the FPU blindly for this kind of computations is not
> necessarily a good plan. I have no idea how these things are analyzed
> and evaluated if at all. Maybe the crypto people can shed some light on
> this.

drivers/net/wireguard/{noise,cookie}.c makes pretty heavy use of BLAKE2s
in hot paths where the FPU is already being used for other algorithms,
and so there the save/restore is worth it (assuming restore finally
works lazily). In benchmarks, the SIMD code made a real difference.

But this presumably regards mix_pool_bytes() in the RNG. If it turns out
that supporting the FPU in hard IRQ context is a major PITA, and the RNG
is the only thing making use of it, then sure, drop hard IRQ context
support for it. However... This may be unearthing a larger bug.
Sebastian and I put in a decent amount of work during 5.18 to remove all
calls to mix_pool_bytes() (and hence to blake2s_compress()) from
add_interrupt_randomness(). Have a look:

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/crng/random.git/tree/drivers/char/random.c#n1289

It now accumulates in some per-CPU buffer, and then every 64 interrupts
a worker runs that does the actual mix_pool_bytes() from kthread
context.

So the question is: what is still hitting mix_pool_bytes() from hard IRQ
context? I'll investigate a bit and see.

Jason