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Commit 2865baf5 authored by Linus Torvalds's avatar Linus Torvalds
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x86: support user address masking instead of non-speculative conditional



The Spectre-v1 mitigations made "access_ok()" much more expensive, since
it has to serialize execution with the test for a valid user address.

All the normal user copy routines avoid this by just masking the user
address with a data-dependent mask instead, but the fast
"unsafe_user_read()" kind of patterms that were supposed to be a fast
case got slowed down.

This introduces a notion of using

	src = masked_user_access_begin(src);

to do the user address sanity using a data-dependent mask instead of the
more traditional conditional

	if (user_read_access_begin(src, len)) {

model.

This model only works for dense accesses that start at 'src' and on
architectures that have a guard region that is guaranteed to fault in
between the user space and the kernel space area.

With this, the user access doesn't need to be manually checked, because
a bad address is guaranteed to fault (by some architecture masking
trick: on x86-64 this involves just turning an invalid user address into
all ones, since we don't map the top of address space).

This only converts a couple of examples for now.  Example x86-64 code
generation for loading two words from user space:

        stac
        mov    %rax,%rcx
        sar    $0x3f,%rcx
        or     %rax,%rcx
        mov    (%rcx),%r13
        mov    0x8(%rcx),%r14
        clac

where all the error handling and -EFAULT is now purely handled out of
line by the exception path.

Of course, if the micro-architecture does badly at 'clac' and 'stac',
the above is still pitifully slow.  But at least we did as well as we
could.

Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
parent 0c383648
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