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Dave Hansen authored
Global pages are bad for hardening because they potentially let an exploit read the kernel image via a Meltdown-style attack which makes it easier to find gadgets. But, global pages are good for performance because they reduce TLB misses when making user/kernel transitions, especially when PCIDs are not available, such as on older hardware, or where a hypervisor has disabled them for some reason. This patch implements a basic, sane policy: If you have PCIDs, you only map a minimal amount of kernel text global. If you do not have PCIDs, you map all kernel text global. This policy effectively makes PCIDs something that not only adds performance but a little bit of hardening as well. I ran a simple "lseek" microbenchmark[1] to test the benefit on a modern Atom microserver. Most of the benefit comes from applying the series before this patch ("entry only"), but there is still a signifiant benefit from this patch. No Global Lines (baseline ): 6077741 lseeks/sec 88 Global Lines (entry only): 7528609 lseeks/sec (+23.9%) 94 Global Lines (this patch): 8433111 lseeks/sec (+38.8%) [1.] https://github.com/antonblanchard/will-it-scale/blob/master/tests/lseek1.cSigned-off-by:
Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com> Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com> Cc: Andy Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org> Cc: Arjan van de Ven <arjan@linux.intel.com> Cc: Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de> Cc: Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com> Cc: David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org> Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org> Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com> Cc: Josh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@redhat.com> Cc: Juergen Gross <jgross@suse.com> Cc: Kees Cook <keescook@google.com> Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Cc: Nadav Amit <namit@vmware.com> Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> Cc: linux-mm@kvack.org Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180406205518.E3D989EB@viggo.jf.intel.comSigned-off-by:
Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
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