x86/KVM: Warn user if KVM is loaded SMT and L1TF CPU bug being present
authorKonrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>
Wed, 20 Jun 2018 15:29:53 +0000 (11:29 -0400)
committerGreg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Wed, 15 Aug 2018 16:12:54 +0000 (18:12 +0200)
commitc2fdbbb47ca834b9b19fbbf0a9b740146a508b84
tree012f6a172a29805401361e53f7bd9592ea960da5
parent7f2229c92b9ea4d4b1b50671b9fe5afadbf0b4f4
x86/KVM: Warn user if KVM is loaded SMT and L1TF CPU bug being present

commit 26acfb666a473d960f0fd971fe68f3e3ad16c70b upstream

If the L1TF CPU bug is present we allow the KVM module to be loaded as the
major of users that use Linux and KVM have trusted guests and do not want a
broken setup.

Cloud vendors are the ones that are uncomfortable with CVE 2018-3620 and as
such they are the ones that should set nosmt to one.

Setting 'nosmt' means that the system administrator also needs to disable
SMT (Hyper-threading) in the BIOS, or via the 'nosmt' command line
parameter, or via the /sys/devices/system/cpu/smt/control. See commit
05736e4ac13c ("cpu/hotplug: Provide knobs to control SMT").

Other mitigations are to use task affinity, cpu sets, interrupt binding,
etc - anything to make sure that _only_ the same guests vCPUs are running
on sibling threads.

Signed-off-by: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt
arch/x86/kvm/vmx.c
kernel/cpu.c