Re: [RFC PATCH 0/2] x86: Fix missing core serialization on migration

[Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>]

On Tue, 14 Nov 2017, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 14, 2017 at 8:05 AM, Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> wrote:
> > On Tue, Nov 14, 2017 at 03:17:12PM +0000, Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:
> >> I've tried to create a small single-threaded self-modifying loop in
> >> user-space to trigger a trace cache or speculative execution quirk,
> >> but I have not succeeded yet. I suspect that I would need to know
> >> more about the internals of the processor architecture to create the
> >> right stalls that would allow speculative execution to move further
> >> ahead, and trigger an incoherent execution flow. Ideas on how to
> >> trigger this would be welcome.
> >
> > I thought the whole problem was per definition multi-threaded.
> >
> > Single-threaded stuff can't get out of sync with itself; you'll always
> > observe your own stores.
> >
> > And ISTR the JIT scenario being something like the JIT overwriting
> > previously executed but supposedly no longer used code. And in this
> > scenario you'd want to guarantee all CPUs observe the new code before
> > jumping into it.
> >
> > The current approach is using mprotect(), except that on a number of
> > platforms the TLB invalidate from that is not guaranteed to be strong
> > enough to sync for code changes.
> >
> > On x86 the mprotect() should work just fine, since we broadcast IPIs for
> > the TLB invalidate and the IRET from those will get the things synced up
> > again (if nothing else; very likely we'll have done a MOV-CR3 which will
> > of course also have sufficient syncness on it).
> >
> > But PowerPC, s390, ARM et al that do TLB invalidates without interrupts
> > and don't guarantee their TLB invalidate sync against execution units
> > are left broken by this scheme.
> >
> 
> On x86 single-thread, you can still get in trouble, I think.  Do a
> store, get migrated, execute the stored code.  There's no actual
> guarantee that the new CPU does a CR3 load due to laziness.

The migration IPI will probably prevent that.

Thanks,

	tglx