Hi Jan,
On 14/08/2024 07:37, Jan Beulich wrote:
On 13.08.2024 19:13, Ayan Kumar Halder wrote:
From: Penny Zheng <penny.zh...@arm.com>
Introduced CONFIG_VMAP which is selected by the architectures that use
MMU. vm_init() does not do anything if CONFIG_VMAP is not enabled.
VMAP is widely used in ALTERNATIVE feature to remap a range of memory
with new memory attributes. Since this is highly dependent on virtual
address translation, we choose to fold VMAP in MMU system.
In this patch, we introduce a new Kconfig CONFIG_HAS_VMAP, and make it
only support in MMU system on ARM architecture. And ALTERNATIVE now
depends on VMAP.
HARDEN_BRANCH_PREDICTOR is now gated on HAS_VMAP as speculative
attacks are not possible on non MMU based systems (ie Cortex-R52, R82).
See
https://developer.arm.com/Arm%20Security%20Center/Speculative%20Processor%20Vulnerability.
While I'm not an Arm expert and hence I'm likely missing aspects, I question
the one (Spectre-BHB) vulnerability there to be sufficient to draw a
conclusion towards the usefulness of branch hardening. I would advise
against encoding such a connection in the Kconfig dependencies.
AFAIU, to address 'Spectre' like vulnerabilities 'branch hardening' was
added.
See https://lore.kernel.org/all/e1fnadd-0000fz...@rmk-pc.armlinux.org.uk/
And from
https://lists.linaro.org/archives/list/linux-stable-mir...@lists.linaro.org/message/F4MGL4WT2R7T54NLRDGKFRQNSXF3DZGD/
Spectre is valid on MMU based systems.
Thus, I would make 'branch hardenining' valid on MMU based systems only.
Let me know your thoughts.
--- a/xen/arch/x86/Kconfig
+++ b/xen/arch/x86/Kconfig
@@ -1,6 +1,7 @@
config X86_64
def_bool y
select 64BIT
+ select HAS_VMAP
config X86
def_bool y
@@ -31,6 +32,7 @@ config X86
select HAS_UBSAN
select HAS_VPCI if HVM
select NEEDS_LIBELF
+ select HAS_VMAP
Why in two places? Also please respect alphabetic sorting here (if this
hunk is kept, which may be the more consistent approach) ...
My mistake. I initially thought user could select one of the two.
However, "vm_init()" is invoked only from xen/arch/x86/setup.c.
Thus, keeping 'HAS_VMAP' under 'config X86' is dufficient.
I agree that HAS_VMAP needs to go before HAS_VPCI.
--- a/xen/common/Kconfig
+++ b/xen/common/Kconfig
@@ -77,6 +77,9 @@ config HAS_PIRQ
config HAS_PMAP
bool
+config HAS_VMAP
+ bool
+
config HAS_SCHED_GRANULARITY
bool
... and here.
Yes, it needs to go after HAS_UBSAN.
- Ayan
Jan
