linux-kernel - Re: [RFC PATCH] x86/msr: Filter MSR writes

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Date:   Fri, 12 Jun 2020 10:20:03 -0700
From:   Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
To:     Borislav Petkov <bp@...en8.de>
Cc:     x86-ml <x86@...nel.org>, lkml <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH] x86/msr: Filter MSR writes

On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 3:50 AM Borislav Petkov <bp@...en8.de> wrote:
>
> Disable writing to MSRs from userspace by default. Writes can still be
> allowed by supplying the allow_writes=1 module parameter and the kernel
> will be tainted so that it shows in oopses.

Since you already added the filtering, this looks fairly sane.

IOW, what MSR's do we expect people to maybe write to normally? You
added MSR_IA32_ENERGY_PERF_BIAS as an allowed MST, maybe there are
others?

So I'm not against this, but I suspect the whitelist should be thought
through more, and then maybe the "allow_writes" parameter should be
yes/no/default/<msr-list>, where "default" is that list of
known-normal MSR's.

And I suspect it's a lot longer list than your single one. IIRC,
people were working around CPU bugs or features by doing MSR writes at
startup.

So the first phase might be to introduce this, but have the default
for non-recognized MSR's be "log", not "deny".

                Linus