Peter Zijlstra 88a817e60d x86/its: Use dynamic thunks for indirect branches ...

commit 872df34d7c upstream.

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.

  [ pawan: CONFIG_EXECMEM_ROX is not supported on backport kernel, made
	   adjustments to set memory to RW and ROX ]

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>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>

2025-05-18 08:24:59 +02:00

4.2 KiB

Raw Blame History

View Raw