Re: [GIT PULL] x86/urgent for v5.11-rc7

From: Linus Torvalds
Date: Sun Feb 07 2021 - 13:17:29 EST


On Sun, Feb 7, 2021 at 9:58 AM Borislav Petkov <bp@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> It probably is an item on some Intel manager's to-enable list. So far,
> the CET enablement concentrates only on userspace but dhansen might know
> more about future plans. CCed.

I think the new Ryzen 5000 series also supports CET, but I don't have
any machines to check.

Hopefully somebody ends up with hardware that supports it and a urge
to try to make it work in kernel land too.

I do suspect involved people should start thinking about how they want
to deal with functions starting with

endbr64
call __fentry__

instead of the call being at the very top of the function.

I _assume_ it's mostly tracing, bpf and objtool that are going to
notice, and it's going to be largely invisible to anybody else.

So hopefully the involved people can at least just try to see how
their code looks when they turn off retpoline and add

-fcf-protection=full

to the compiler command line (assuming they have a gcc that can do
it), even if they can't actually test the end result on hardware.

Linus