Re: [PATCH v2 5/8] x86/speculation: Add basic support for IBPB

[David Woodhouse]

On Sun, 2018-01-21 at 19:37 +0000, Andrew Cooper wrote:
> 
> It doesn't matter if an attacker can use SP1 to try and skip the IBPB.
> 
> Exits to userspace/guest are serialising (with some retroactive updates
> to the architecture spec coming), so an attacker can't cause victim code
> to be executed before speculation has caught up and noticed that the
> IBPB did need to happen.

For the specific case of IBPB, knowing what we do about non-
architectural behaviour, that's probably true.

In the early patch sets in both Xen and Linux, we did have a
conditional branch on {sys,hyper}call entry that blithely let the CPU
speculate all the way to the {sys,hyper}call table jump. No exit to
userspace/guest there.

Which is why I've been saying I want call sites to have an *explicit*
comment saying why they're safe to use conditional branches without
taking extra steps to be safe, like the 'else lfence'. And why I'd
really like the underlying primitives to *support* being fixed at
runtime.

ALTERNATIVE is fine for now, and can end up with basically the same
code as static_cpu_has() â either we do the wrmsr, or we jump/nop over
where it used to be. Let's worry about getting clever with it *later*.

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