linux-kernel - Re: Redoing eXclusive Page Frame Ownership (XPFO) with isolated CPUs in mind (for KVM to isolate its guests per CPU)

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Date:   Tue, 21 Aug 2018 10:57:03 +0100
From:   David Woodhouse <dwmw2@...radead.org>
To:     Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
Cc:     Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@...cle.com>,
        juerg.haefliger@....com, deepa.srinivasan@...cle.com,
        Jim Mattson <jmattson@...gle.com>,
        Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@...rix.com>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        Boris Ostrovsky <boris.ostrovsky@...cle.com>,
        linux-mm <linux-mm@...ck.org>,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
        joao.m.martins@...cle.com, pradeep.vincent@...cle.com,
        Andi Kleen <ak@...ux.intel.com>,
        Khalid Aziz <khalid.aziz@...cle.com>,
        kanth.ghatraju@...cle.com, Liran Alon <liran.alon@...cle.com>,
        Kees Cook <keescook@...gle.com>, jsteckli@...inf.tu-dresden.de,
        Kernel Hardening <kernel-hardening@...ts.openwall.com>,
        chris.hyser@...cle.com, Tyler Hicks <tyhicks@...onical.com>,
        John Haxby <john.haxby@...cle.com>,
        Jon Masters <jcm@...hat.com>
Subject: Re: Redoing eXclusive Page Frame Ownership (XPFO) with isolated
 CPUs in mind (for KVM to isolate its guests per CPU)

On Mon, 2018-08-20 at 15:27 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 20, 2018 at 3:02 PM Woodhouse, David <dwmw@...zon.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> > It's the *kernel* we don't want being able to access those pages,
> > because of the multitude of unfixable cache load gadgets.
> 
> Ahh.
> 
> I guess the proof is in the pudding. Did somebody try to forward-port
> that patch set and see what the performance is like?

I hadn't actually seen the XPFO patch set before; we're going to take a
serious look.

Of course, this is only really something that a select few people (with
quite a lot of machines) would turn on. And they might be willing to
tolerate a significant performance cost if the alternative way to be
safe is to disable hyperthreading entirely — which is Intel's best
recommendation so far, it seems.

Another alternative... I'm told POWER8 does an interesting thing with
hyperthreading and gang scheduling for KVM. The host kernel doesn't
actually *see* the hyperthreads at all, and KVM just launches the full
set of siblings when it enters a guest, and gathers them again when any
of them exits. That's definitely worth investigating as an option for
x86, too.

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