Re: l1tf: Kernel suggests I throw away third of my memory. I'd rather not

[Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>]

On Wed 17-10-18 12:56:10, Pavel Machek wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> 6a012288 suggests I throw away 1GB on RAM. On 3GB system.. that is not
> going to be pleasant.
> 
> l1tf.html says:
> 
> # The Linux kernel contains a mitigation for this attack vector, PTE
> # inversion, which is permanently enabled and has no performance
> # impact.
> 
> I don't believe it has "no" performance impact, but I guess it is lost
> in the noise.

Please prove otherwise. I would be more than surprised if inverting pfn
part of the pte is noticeable. But I can be wrong of course.

> #  The kernel ensures that the address bits of PTEs, which are
> # not marked present, never point to cacheable physical memory space.
> 
> # A system with an up to date kernel is protected against attacks from
> # malicious user space applications.
> 
> These are not true.
> 
> cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/vulnerabilities/l1tf
> Vulnerable
> uname -a
> Linux amd 4.19.0-rc8-next-20181017autobisect1539371050 #189 SMP Wed
> Oct 17 12:04:23 CEST 2018 i686 GNU/Linux

This is a result of you having memory above MAX_PFN/2 right?

> Now question is... can we do better? Kernel stores information about
> swapped-out pages there, right? That sounds like a cool hack, but
> maybe it is time to get rid of that hack?

Patches are welcome.
 
> As a workaround, can I simply do swapoff -a to be safe for now?

Well, that depends. Do you care about PROT_NONE attacks as well? If not
then no-swap would help you. But even then no-swap is rather theoretical
attack on a physical host unless you allow an arbitrary swapout to a
malicious user (e.g. allow a user controlled memcg hard limit that would
cause excessive local swapouts).

-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs