From: Andy Lutomirski Date: Tue, 14 May 2019 20:24:40 +0000 (-0700) Subject: x86/speculation/mds: Improve CPU buffer clear documentation X-Git-Url: https://git.stricted.de/?a=commitdiff_plain;h=4506bca2a894147692bf3427d29b3527f7f36936;p=GitHub%2FLineageOS%2Fandroid_kernel_motorola_exynos9610.git x86/speculation/mds: Improve CPU buffer clear documentation commit 9d8d0294e78a164d407133dea05caf4b84247d6a upstream. On x86_64, all returns to usermode go through prepare_exit_to_usermode(), with the sole exception of do_nmi(). This even includes machine checks -- this was added several years ago to support MCE recovery. Update the documentation. Signed-off-by: Andy Lutomirski Cc: Borislav Petkov Cc: Frederic Weisbecker Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman Cc: Jon Masters Cc: Linus Torvalds Cc: Peter Zijlstra Cc: Thomas Gleixner Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org Fixes: 04dcbdb80578 ("x86/speculation/mds: Clear CPU buffers on exit to user") Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/999fa9e126ba6a48e9d214d2f18dbde5c62ac55c.1557865329.git.luto@kernel.org Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman --- diff --git a/Documentation/x86/mds.rst b/Documentation/x86/mds.rst index 0dc812bb9249..5d4330be200f 100644 --- a/Documentation/x86/mds.rst +++ b/Documentation/x86/mds.rst @@ -142,38 +142,13 @@ Mitigation points mds_user_clear. The mitigation is invoked in prepare_exit_to_usermode() which covers - most of the kernel to user space transitions. There are a few exceptions - which are not invoking prepare_exit_to_usermode() on return to user - space. These exceptions use the paranoid exit code. - - - Non Maskable Interrupt (NMI): - - Access to sensible data like keys, credentials in the NMI context is - mostly theoretical: The CPU can do prefetching or execute a - misspeculated code path and thereby fetching data which might end up - leaking through a buffer. - - But for mounting other attacks the kernel stack address of the task is - already valuable information. So in full mitigation mode, the NMI is - mitigated on the return from do_nmi() to provide almost complete - coverage. - - - Machine Check Exception (#MC): - - Another corner case is a #MC which hits between the CPU buffer clear - invocation and the actual return to user. As this still is in kernel - space it takes the paranoid exit path which does not clear the CPU - buffers. So the #MC handler repopulates the buffers to some - extent. Machine checks are not reliably controllable and the window is - extremly small so mitigation would just tick a checkbox that this - theoretical corner case is covered. To keep the amount of special - cases small, ignore #MC. - - - Debug Exception (#DB): - - This takes the paranoid exit path only when the INT1 breakpoint is in - kernel space. #DB on a user space address takes the regular exit path, - so no extra mitigation required. + all but one of the kernel to user space transitions. The exception + is when we return from a Non Maskable Interrupt (NMI), which is + handled directly in do_nmi(). + + (The reason that NMI is special is that prepare_exit_to_usermode() can + enable IRQs. In NMI context, NMIs are blocked, and we don't want to + enable IRQs with NMIs blocked.) 2. C-State transition