Re: [PATCH v3 00/16] objtool: Detect and warn about indirect calls in __nocfi functions

[Sean Christopherson <seanjc@google.com>]

On Mon, Jul 14, 2025, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> 
> Hi!
> 
> On kCFI (CONFIG_CFI_CLANG=y) builds all indirect calls should have the CFI
> check on (with very few exceptions). Not having the CFI checks undermines the
> protection provided by CFI and will make these sites candidates for people
> wanting to steal your cookies.
> 
> Specifically the ABI changes are so that doing indirect calls without the CFI
> magic, to a CFI adorned function is not compatible (although it happens to work
> for some setups, it very much does not for FineIBT).
> 
> Rust people tripped over this the other day, since their 'core' happened to
> have some no_sanitize(kcfi) bits in, which promptly exploded when ran with
> FineIBT on.
> 
> Since this is very much not a supported model -- on purpose, have objtool
> detect and warn about such constructs.
> 
> This effort [1] found all existing [2] non-cfi indirect calls in the kernel.
> 
> Notably the KVM fastop emulation stuff -- which is completely rewritten -- the
> generated code doesn't look horrific, but is slightly more verbose. I'm running
> on the assumption that instruction emulation is not super performance critical
> these days of zero VM-exit VMs etc. Paolo noted that pre-Westmere (2010) cares
> about this.

Yeah, I'm confident the fastop stuff isn't performance critical.  I'm skeptical
that fastops were _ever_ about raw performance.  

Running with EPT disabled to force emulation of Big RM, with OVMF and a 64-bit
Linux guest, I get literally zero hits on fastop().  With SeaBIOS and a 32-bit
Linux guest, booting a 24 vCPU VM hits <40 fastops.

Maybe there are some super legacy workloads that still heavily utilize Big RM,
but if they exist, I've no idea what they are, and AFAICT that was never the
motivation.

As highlighted in the original cover letter[*], fastops reduced the code footprint
of kvm/emulate.o by ~2500 bytes.  And as called out by commit e28bbd44dad1 ("KVM:
x86 emulator: framework for streamlining arithmetic opcodes"), executing a proxy
for the to-be-emulated instruction is all about functional correctness, e.g. to
ensure arithmetic RFLAGS match exactly.  Nothing suggests that performance was ever
a motivating factor.

I strongly suspect that the "fastop" name was a fairly arbitrary choice, and the
framework needed to be called _something_.  And then everyone since has assumed
that the motivation for fastops was to go fast, when in fact that was just a happy
side effect of the implementation.

https://lore.kernel.org/all/1356179217-5526-1-git-send-email-avi.kivity@gmail.com


So, with the _EX goof fixed, and "KVM: x86:" for all the relevant KVM patches:

Acked-by: Sean Christopherson <seanjc@google.com>


P.S. Thanks a ton for cleaning this up!