Updated the documentation for a new CVE-2019-11091 Microarchitectural Data
Sampling Uncacheable Memory (MDSUM) which is a variant of
Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS). MDS is a family of side channel
attacks on internal buffers in Intel CPUs.
MDSUM is a special case of MSBDS, MFBDS and MLPDS. An uncacheable load from
memory that takes a fault or assist can leave data in a microarchitectural
structure that may later be observed using one of the same methods used by
MSBDS, MFBDS or MLPDS. There are no new code changes expected for MDSUM.
The existing mitigation for MDS applies to MDSUM as well.
Signed-off-by: Pawan Gupta <pawan.kumar.gupta@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Reviewed-by: Tyler Hicks <tyhicks@canonical.com>
Reviewed-by: Jon Masters <jcm@redhat.com>
In virtualized environments it can happen that the host has the microcode
update which utilizes the VERW instruction to clear CPU buffers, but the
hypervisor is not yet updated to expose the X86_FEATURE_MD_CLEAR CPUID bit
to guests.
Introduce an internal mitigation mode VMWERV which enables the invocation
of the CPU buffer clearing even if X86_FEATURE_MD_CLEAR is not set. If the
system has no updated microcode this results in a pointless execution of
the VERW instruction wasting a few CPU cycles. If the microcode is updated,
but not exposed to a guest then the CPU buffers will be cleared.
That said: Virtual Machines Will Eventually Receive Vaccine
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Reviewed-by: Borislav Petkov <bp@suse.de>
Reviewed-by: Jon Masters <jcm@redhat.com>
Tested-by: Jon Masters <jcm@redhat.com>
Add a static key which controls the invocation of the CPU buffer clear
mechanism on idle entry. This is independent of other MDS mitigations
because the idle entry invocation to mitigate the potential leakage due to
store buffer repartitioning is only necessary on SMT systems.
Add the actual invocations to the different halt/mwait variants which
covers all usage sites. mwaitx is not patched as it's not available on
Intel CPUs.
The buffer clear is only invoked before entering the C-State to prevent
that stale data from the idling CPU is spilled to the Hyper-Thread sibling
after the Store buffer got repartitioned and all entries are available to
the non idle sibling.
When coming out of idle the store buffer is partitioned again so each
sibling has half of it available. Now CPU which returned from idle could be
speculatively exposed to contents of the sibling, but the buffers are
flushed either on exit to user space or on VMENTER.
When later on conditional buffer clearing is implemented on top of this,
then there is no action required either because before returning to user
space the context switch will set the condition flag which causes a flush
on the return to user path.
Note, that the buffer clearing on idle is only sensible on CPUs which are
solely affected by MSBDS and not any other variant of MDS because the other
MDS variants cannot be mitigated when SMT is enabled, so the buffer
clearing on idle would be a window dressing exercise.
This intentionally does not handle the case in the acpi/processor_idle
driver which uses the legacy IO port interface for C-State transitions for
two reasons:
- The acpi/processor_idle driver was replaced by the intel_idle driver
almost a decade ago. Anything Nehalem upwards supports it and defaults
to that new driver.
- The legacy IO port interface is likely to be used on older and therefore
unaffected CPUs or on systems which do not receive microcode updates
anymore, so there is no point in adding that.
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Reviewed-by: Borislav Petkov <bp@suse.de>
Reviewed-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Reviewed-by: Frederic Weisbecker <frederic@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Jon Masters <jcm@redhat.com>
Tested-by: Jon Masters <jcm@redhat.com>
Add a static key which controls the invocation of the CPU buffer clear
mechanism on exit to user space and add the call into
prepare_exit_to_usermode() and do_nmi() right before actually returning.
Add documentation which kernel to user space transition this covers and
explain why some corner cases are not mitigated.
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Reviewed-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Reviewed-by: Borislav Petkov <bp@suse.de>
Reviewed-by: Frederic Weisbecker <frederic@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Jon Masters <jcm@redhat.com>
Tested-by: Jon Masters <jcm@redhat.com>
The Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) vulernabilities are mitigated by
clearing the affected CPU buffers. The mechanism for clearing the buffers
uses the unused and obsolete VERW instruction in combination with a
microcode update which triggers a CPU buffer clear when VERW is executed.
Provide a inline function with the assembly magic. The argument of the VERW
instruction must be a memory operand as documented:
"MD_CLEAR enumerates that the memory-operand variant of VERW (for
example, VERW m16) has been extended to also overwrite buffers affected
by MDS. This buffer overwriting functionality is not guaranteed for the
register operand variant of VERW."
Documentation also recommends to use a writable data segment selector:
"The buffer overwriting occurs regardless of the result of the VERW
permission check, as well as when the selector is null or causes a
descriptor load segment violation. However, for lowest latency we
recommend using a selector that indicates a valid writable data
segment."
Add x86 specific documentation about MDS and the internal workings of the
mitigation.
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Reviewed-by: Borislav Petkov <bp@suse.de>
Reviewed-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Reviewed-by: Frederic Weisbecker <frederic@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Jon Masters <jcm@redhat.com>
Tested-by: Jon Masters <jcm@redhat.com>
