linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] x86/mce: Fix set_mce

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Date:   Thu, 30 Aug 2018 21:25:03 -0700
From:   Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
To:     Tony Luck <tony.luck@...el.com>
Cc:     Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@...hat.com>, Peter Anvin <hpa@...or.com>,
        Borislav Petkov <bp@...en8.de>,
        linux-edac <linux-edac@...r.kernel.org>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        "the arch/x86 maintainers" <x86@...nel.org>,
        Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@...el.com>,
        Dave Jiang <dave.jiang@...el.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] x86/mce: Fix set_mce_nospec() to avoid #GP fault

On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 6:49 PM Tony Luck <tony.luck@...el.com> wrote:
>
> Just checking "do we have a non-canonical address" at the bottom of that
> call stack and flipping bit 63 back on again seems like a bad idea.

You could literally do something like

    /* Make it canonical in case we flipped the high bit */
    addr = (long)(addr<<1)>>1;

in the call to clflush and it magically does the right thing.

Pretty? No. But with a big comment about what is going on and why it's
done, I think it's prettier than your much bigger patch.

I dunno. It does strike me as a bit hacky, but I'd rather have a
*small*  one-liner hack that generates two instructions, than add a
complex hack that modifies the page tables three times and has a
serializing instruction in it.

Both are subtle fixes for a subtle issue, but one seems pretty
harmless in comparison.

Hmm?

But I'll bow to the x86 maintainers.

             Linus