tree 26d935f6d21b4695e2c14778330feb2edb1c2139
parent cdc2724c9d060a8fa9652a9aa6347d8324f6cd82
author Daniel Sneddon <daniel.sneddon@linux.intel.com> 1689216192 -0700
committer Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org> 1691516905 +0200

x86/speculation: Add force option to GDS mitigation

commit 553a5c03e90a6087e88f8ff878335ef0621536fb upstream

The Gather Data Sampling (GDS) vulnerability allows malicious software
to infer stale data previously stored in vector registers. This may
include sensitive data such as cryptographic keys. GDS is mitigated in
microcode, and systems with up-to-date microcode are protected by
default. However, any affected system that is running with older
microcode will still be vulnerable to GDS attacks.

Since the gather instructions used by the attacker are part of the
AVX2 and AVX512 extensions, disabling these extensions prevents gather
instructions from being executed, thereby mitigating the system from
GDS. Disabling AVX2 is sufficient, but we don't have the granularity
to do this. The XCR0[2] disables AVX, with no option to just disable
AVX2.

Add a kernel parameter gather_data_sampling=force that will enable the
microcode mitigation if available, otherwise it will disable AVX on
affected systems.

This option will be ignored if cmdline mitigations=off.

This is a *big* hammer.  It is known to break buggy userspace that
uses incomplete, buggy AVX enumeration.  Unfortunately, such userspace
does exist in the wild:

	https://www.mail-archive.com/bug-coreutils@gnu.org/msg33046.html

[ dhansen: add some more ominous warnings about disabling AVX ]

Signed-off-by: Daniel Sneddon <daniel.sneddon@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com>
Acked-by: Josh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Daniel Sneddon <daniel.sneddon@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>