On Sun, 18 Nov 2018, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > So, I think it's as theoretical as any other spectrev2 (only with the > > extra "HT" condition added on top). > > What? No. > > It's *way* more theoretical than something like meltdown, which could > be trivially used to get data from another protection domain.
Oh yeah, I absolutely agree that spectrev2 and Meltdown and completely different beasts. > Have you seen any actual realistic attacks for normal human users? > Things where the *kernel* should actually care? > > The javascript thing is for the browser to fix up, It's probably not just browsers, but anything running JITed sandboxed code. So the most straightforward way might be the prctl() aproach, where userspace would claim "I do care about this, please fix it up for me". So prctl() + perhaps SECCOMP. Which gets us back to Tim's fixup patch. Do you still prefer the revert, given the existence of that? I think that if Tim's fixup makes it through (it's currently missing SECCOMP handling, but that is trivial to add on top), it might be the best compromise. We'd also have have to make IBPB obey it to be consistent (and get even a few more % of performance back), but that's easy as well. Thanks, -- Jiri Kosina SUSE Labs
