KVM: x86: Expose Predictive Store Forwarding Disable
Predictive Store Forwarding: AMD Zen3 processors feature a new technology called Predictive Store Forwarding (PSF). PSF is a hardware-based micro-architectural optimization designed to improve the performance of code execution by predicting address dependencies between loads and stores. How PSF works: It is very common for a CPU to execute a load instruction to an address that was recently written by a store. Modern CPUs implement a technique known as Store-To-Load-Forwarding (STLF) to improve performance in such cases. With STLF, data from the store is forwarded directly to the load without having to wait for it to be written to memory. In a typical CPU, STLF occurs after the address of both the load and store are calculated and determined to match. PSF expands on this by speculating on the relationship between loads and stores without waiting for the address calculation to complete. With PSF, the CPU learns over time the relationship between loads and stores. If STLF typically occurs between a particular store and load, the CPU will remember this. In typical code, PSF provides a performance benefit by speculating on the load result and allowing later instructions to begin execution sooner than they otherwise would be able to. The details of security analysis of AMD predictive store forwarding is documented here. https://www.amd.com/system/files/documents/security-analysis-predictive-store-forwarding.pdf Predictive Store Forwarding controls: There are two hardware control bits which influence the PSF feature: - MSR 48h bit 2 – Speculative Store Bypass (SSBD) - MSR 48h bit 7 – Predictive Store Forwarding Disable (PSFD) The PSF feature is disabled if either of these bits are set. These bits are controllable on a per-thread basis in an SMT system. By default, both SSBD and PSFD are 0 meaning that the speculation features are enabled. While the SSBD bit disables PSF and speculative store bypass, PSFD only disables PSF. PSFD may be desirable for software which is concerned with the speculative behavior of PSF but desires a smaller performance impact than setting SSBD. Support for PSFD is indicated in CPUID Fn8000_0008 EBX[28]. All processors that support PSF will also support PSFD. Linux kernel does not have the interface to enable/disable PSFD yet. Plan here is to expose the PSFD technology to KVM so that the guest kernel can make use of it if they wish to. Signed-off-by: Babu Moger <Babu.Moger@amd.com> Message-Id: <163244601049.30292.5855870305350227855.stgit@bmoger-ubuntu> [Keep feature private to KVM, as requested by Borislav Petkov. - Paolo] Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
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