On 7/12/19 1:44 PM, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 04:25:12PM +0200, Alexandre Chartre wrote:Kernel Address Space Isolation aims to use address spaces to isolate some parts of the kernel (for example KVM) to prevent leaking sensitive data between hyper-threads under speculative execution attacks. You can refer to the first version of this RFC for more context: https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/5/13/515No, no, no! That is the crux of this entire series; you're not punting on explaining exactly why we want to go dig through 26 patches of gunk. You get to exactly explain what (your definition of) sensitive data is, and which speculative scenarios and how this approach mitigates them. And included in that is a high level overview of the whole thing.
Ok, I will rework the explanation. Sorry about that.
On the one hand you've made this implementation for KVM, while on the other hand you're saying it is generic but then fail to describe any !KVM user. AFAIK all speculative fails this is relevant to are now public, so excruciating horrible details are fine and required.
Ok.
AFAIK2 this is all because of MDS but it also helps with v1.
Yes, mostly MDS and also L1TF.
AFAIK3 this wants/needs to be combined with core-scheduling to be useful, but not a single mention of that is anywhere.
No. This is actually an alternative to core-scheduling. Eventually, ASI will kick all sibling hyperthreads when exiting isolation and it needs to run with the full kernel page-table (note that's currently not in these patches). So ASI can be seen as an optimization to disabling hyperthreading: instead of just disabling hyperthreading you run with ASI, and when ASI can't preserve isolation you will basically run with a single thread. I will add all that to the explanation. Thanks, alex.
