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Daniel Borkmann authored
Spectre v4 gadgets make use of memory disambiguation, which is a set of techniques that execute memory access instructions, that is, loads and stores, out of program order; Intel's optimization manual, section 2.4.4.5: A load instruction micro-op may depend on a preceding store. Many microarchitectures block loads until all preceding store addresses are known. The memory disambiguator predicts which loads will not depend on any previous stores. When the disambiguator predicts that a load does not have such a dependency, the load takes its data from the L1 data cache. Eventually, the prediction is verified. If an actual conflict is detected, the load and all succeeding instructions are re-executed. af86ca4e ("bpf: Prevent memory disambiguation attack") tried to mitigate this attack by sanitizing the memory locations through preemptive "fast" (low latency) stores of zero prior to the actual "slow" (high latency) sto...
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