Re: [GIT PULL] x86/mm changes for v4.21

Luck, Tony
2019-02-07T17:36:03Z

On Thu, Feb 07, 2019 at 03:01:31PM +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 07, 2019 at 11:50:52AM +0000, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > If you re-generate the canonical address in __cpa_addr(), now we'll
> > actually have the real virtual address around for a lot of code-paths
> > (pte lookup etc), which was what people wanted to avoid in the first
> > place.
>
> Note that it's an 'unsigned long' address, not an actual pointer, and
> (afaict) non of the code paths use it as a pointer. This _should_ avoid
> the CPU from following said pointer and doing a deref on it.

The type doesn't matter. You want to avoid having the
true value in the register as long as possible. Ideal
spot would be the instruction before the TLB is flushed.

The speculative issue is that any branch you encounter
while you have the address in a register may be mispredicted.
You might also get a bogus hit in the branch target cache
and speculatively jump into the weeds. While there you
could find an instruction that loads using that register, and
even though it is speculative and the instruction won't
retire, a machine check log will be created in a bank (no
machine check is signalled).

Once the TLB is updated, you are safe. A speculative
access to an uncached address will not load or log anything.

-Tony