On Tue, 2018-05-29 at 15:22 +0000, Diana Madalina Craciun wrote: > Hi Scott, > > Thanks for the review. > > On 05/22/2018 11:31 PM, Scott Wood wrote: > > On Tue, 2018-05-22 at 10:10 +0300, Diana Craciun wrote: > > > Implement the barrier_nospec as a isync;sync instruction sequence. > > > The implementation uses the infrastructure built for BOOK3S 64 > > > with the difference that for NXP platforms there is no firmware involved > > > and the need for a speculation barrier is read from the device tree. > > > I have used the same name for the property: > > > fsl,needs-spec-barrier-for-bounds-check > > > > Using the device tree this way means that anyone without an updated device > > tree won't get the protection. I also don't see any device tree updates > > -- > > which chips are affected? > > I was planning to have the device tree changes in a different patch-set. > The affected cores are e500, e500mc, e5500, e6500.
So, all supported FSL/NXP book E chips. Why not just enable the workaround unconditionally (and revisit if NXP ever produces a book E chip that doesn't need it and/or e200 is ever supported if that's simple enough to be immune)? > > Why patch nops in if not enabled? Aren't those locations already > > nops? For > > that matter, how can this function even be called on FSL_BOOK3E with > > enable != > > true? > > There is some code in arch/powerpc/kernel/security.c which allows > control of barrier_nospec via debugfs. OK. > > Should there be a way for the user to choose not to enable this (editing > > the > > device tree doesn't count), for a use case that is not sufficiently > > security > > sensitive to justify the performance loss? What is the performance impact > > of > > this patch? > > My reason was that on the other architectures Spectre variant 1 > mitigations are not disabled either. But I think that it might be a good > idea to add a bootarg parameter to disable the barrier. Is there a specific policy reason why they allow spectre v2 to be disabled but not v1, or just a matter of not having a mechanism to disable it, or the parts which could practically be disabled not impacting performance much? -Scott