• Josh Poimboeuf's avatar
    x86: Remove X86_FEATURE_MFENCE_RDTSC · be261ffc
    Josh Poimboeuf authored
    AMD and Intel both have serializing lfence (X86_FEATURE_LFENCE_RDTSC).
    They've both had it for a long time, and AMD has had it enabled in Linux
    since Spectre v1 was announced.
    
    Back then, there was a proposal to remove the serializing mfence feature
    bit (X86_FEATURE_MFENCE_RDTSC), since both AMD and Intel have
    serializing lfence.  At the time, it was (ahem) speculated that some
    hypervisors might not yet support its removal, so it remained for the
    time being.
    
    Now a year-and-a-half later, it should be safe to remove.
    
    I asked Andrew Cooper about whether it's still needed:
    
      So if you're virtualised, you've got no choice in the matter.  lfence
      is either dispatch-serialising or not on AMD, and you won't be able to
      change it.
    
      Furthermore, you can't accurately tell what state the bit is in, because
      the MSR might not be virtualised at all, or may not reflect the true
      state in hardware.  Worse still, attempting to set the bit may not be
      successful even if there isn't a fault for doing so.
    
      Xen sets the DE_CFG bit unconditionally, as does Linux by the looks of
      things (see MSR_F10H_DECFG_LFENCE_SERIALIZE_BIT).  ISTR other hypervisor
      vendors saying the same, but I don't have any information to hand.
    
      If you are running under a hypervisor which has been updated, then
      lfence will almost certainly be dispatch-serialising in practice, and
      you'll almost certainly see the bit already set in DE_CFG.  If you're
      running under a hypervisor which hasn't been patched since Spectre,
      you've already lost in many more ways.
    
      I'd argue that X86_FEATURE_MFENCE_RDTSC is not worth keeping.
    
    So remove it.  This will reduce some code rot, and also make it easier
    to hook barrier_nospec() up to a cmdline disable for performance
    raisins, without having to need an alternative_3() macro.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJosh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@redhat.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarThomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
    Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/d990aa51e40063acb9888e8c1b688e41355a9588.1562255067.git.jpoimboe@redhat.com
    be261ffc
barrier.h 2.41 KB