[RFC 04/10] x86/mm: Only flush indirect branches when switching into non dumpable process

From: KarimAllah Ahmed
Date: Sat Jan 20 2018 - 14:24:24 EST


From: Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Flush indirect branches when switching into a process that marked
itself non dumpable. This protects high value processes like gpg
better, without having too high performance overhead.

Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen <ak@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: David Woodhouse <dwmw@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: KarimAllah Ahmed <karahmed@xxxxxxxxx>
---
arch/x86/mm/tlb.c | 13 ++++++++++++-
1 file changed, 12 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/arch/x86/mm/tlb.c b/arch/x86/mm/tlb.c
index 304de7d..f64e80c 100644
--- a/arch/x86/mm/tlb.c
+++ b/arch/x86/mm/tlb.c
@@ -225,8 +225,19 @@ void switch_mm_irqs_off(struct mm_struct *prev, struct mm_struct *next,
* Avoid user/user BTB poisoning by flushing the branch predictor
* when switching between processes. This stops one process from
* doing Spectre-v2 attacks on another.
+ *
+ * As an optimization: Flush indirect branches only when
+ * switching into processes that disable dumping.
+ *
+ * This will not flush when switching into kernel threads.
+ * But it would flush when switching into idle and back
+ *
+ * It might be useful to have a one-off cache here
+ * to also not flush the idle case, but we would need some
+ * kind of stable sequence number to remember the previous mm.
*/
- indirect_branch_prediction_barrier();
+ if (tsk && tsk->mm && get_dumpable(tsk->mm) != SUID_DUMP_USER)
+ indirect_branch_prediction_barrier();

if (IS_ENABLED(CONFIG_VMAP_STACK)) {
/*
--
2.7.4