Peter Zijlstra 872df34d7c x86/its: Use dynamic thunks for indirect branches ...

ITS mitigation moves the unsafe indirect branches to a safe thunk. This
could degrade the prediction accuracy as the source address of indirect
branches becomes same for different execution paths.

To improve the predictions, and hence the performance, assign a separate
thunk for each indirect callsite. This is also a defense-in-depth measure
to avoid indirect branches aliasing with each other.

As an example, 5000 dynamic thunks would utilize around 16 bits of the
address space, thereby gaining entropy. For a BTB that uses
32 bits for indexing, dynamic thunks could provide better prediction
accuracy over fixed thunks.

Have ITS thunks be variable sized and use EXECMEM_MODULE_TEXT such that
they are both more flexible (got to extend them later) and live in 2M TLBs,
just like kernel code, avoiding undue TLB pressure.

Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Signed-off-by: Pawan Gupta <pawan.kumar.gupta@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com>
Reviewed-by: Alexandre Chartre <alexandre.chartre@oracle.com>

2025-05-09 13:36:58 -07:00

7.1 KiB

Raw Blame History

View Raw