On Fri, 24 Nov 2017, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> From: Dave Hansen <dave.han...@linux.intel.com>
>
> The KAISER CR3 switches are expensive for many reasons. Not all systems
> benefit from the protection provided by KAISER. Some of them can not
> pay the high performance cost.
>
> This patch adds a debugfs file. To disable KAISER, you do:
>
> echo 0 > /sys/kernel/debug/x86/kaiser-enabled
>
> and to re-enable it, you can:
>
> echo 1 > /sys/kernel/debug/x86/kaiser-enabled
>
> This is a *minimal* implementation. There are certainly plenty of
> optimizations that can be done on top of this by using ALTERNATIVES
> among other things.
It's not only minimal. It's naive and broken. That thing explodes when
toggled in the wrong moment. I did not even attempt to debug that, because
I think the approach is wrong.
If you really want to make it runtime switchable, then:
- the shadow tables need to be updated unconditionally. I did not check
whether thats done right now, but explosions are simpler to achieve when
switching it back on. Though switching it off crashes as well.
- you need to make sure that no task is in user space or on the way to it.
The much I hate stop_machine(), that's probably the right tool.
Once everything is in stomp_machine() the switch can be flipped.
- the poisoning/unpoisoning of the kernel tables does not need to be done
from stop_machine(). That can be done from regular context with a TIF
flag, so you can make sure that every task is up to date before
returning to user space. Though that needs a lot of thought.
For now I really want to see that removed entirely and replaced by a simple
boot time switch. We can use the global variable for now and optimize it
later on.
Thanks,
tglx
