user/sven/linux.git/Documentation/admin-guide, branch v5.4.2

x86/speculation: Fix incorrect MDS/TAA mitigation status

2019-11-29T09:09:46Z

commit 64870ed1b12e235cfca3f6c6da75b542c973ff78 upstream. For MDS vulnerable processors with TSX support, enabling either MDS or TAA mitigations will enable the use of VERW to flush internal processor buffers at the right code path. IOW, they are either both mitigated or both not. However, if the command line options are inconsistent, the vulnerabilites sysfs files may not report the mitigation status correctly. For example, with only the "mds=off" option: vulnerabilities/mds:Vulnerable; SMT vulnerable vulnerabilities/tsx_async_abort:Mitigation: Clear CPU buffers; SMT vulnerable The mds vulnerabilities file has wrong status in this case. Similarly, the taa vulnerability file will be wrong with mds mitigation on, but taa off. Change taa_select_mitigation() to sync up the two mitigation status and have them turned off if both "mds=off" and "tsx_async_abort=off" are present. Update documentation to emphasize the fact that both "mds=off" and "tsx_async_abort=off" have to be specified together for processors that are affected by both TAA and MDS to be effective. [ bp: Massage and add kernel-parameters.txt change too. ] Fixes: 1b42f017415b ("x86/speculation/taa: Add mitigation for TSX Async Abort") Signed-off-by: Waiman Long Signed-off-by: Borislav Petkov Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman Cc: "H. Peter Anvin" Cc: Ingo Molnar Cc: Jiri Kosina Cc: Jonathan Corbet Cc: Josh Poimboeuf Cc: linux-doc@vger.kernel.org Cc: Mark Gross Cc: Cc: Pawan Gupta Cc: Peter Zijlstra Cc: Thomas Gleixner Cc: Tim Chen Cc: Tony Luck Cc: Tyler Hicks Cc: x86-ml Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20191115161445.30809-2-longman@redhat.com Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman

Documentation: Add ITLB_MULTIHIT documentation

2019-11-04T19:26:00Z

Add the initial ITLB_MULTIHIT documentation. [ tglx: Add it to the index so it gets actually built. ] Signed-off-by: Antonio Gomez Iglesias Signed-off-by: Nelson D'Souza Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner

kvm: x86: mmu: Recovery of shattered NX large pages

2019-11-04T19:26:00Z

The page table pages corresponding to broken down large pages are zapped in FIFO order, so that the large page can potentially be recovered, if it is not longer being used for execution. This removes the performance penalty for walking deeper EPT page tables. By default, one large page will last about one hour once the guest reaches a steady state. Signed-off-by: Junaid Shahid Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner

kvm: mmu: ITLB_MULTIHIT mitigation

2019-11-04T11:22:02Z

With some Intel processors, putting the same virtual address in the TLB as both a 4 KiB and 2 MiB page can confuse the instruction fetch unit and cause the processor to issue a machine check resulting in a CPU lockup. Unfortunately when EPT page tables use huge pages, it is possible for a malicious guest to cause this situation. Add a knob to mark huge pages as non-executable. When the nx_huge_pages parameter is enabled (and we are using EPT), all huge pages are marked as NX. If the guest attempts to execute in one of those pages, the page is broken down into 4K pages, which are then marked executable. This is not an issue for shadow paging (except nested EPT), because then the host is in control of TLB flushes and the problematic situation cannot happen. With nested EPT, again the nested guest can cause problems shadow and direct EPT is treated in the same way. [ tglx: Fixup default to auto and massage wording a bit ] Originally-by: Junaid Shahid Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner

x86/speculation/taa: Add documentation for TSX Async Abort

2019-10-28T07:37:00Z

Add the documenation for TSX Async Abort. Include the description of the issue, how to check the mitigation state, control the mitigation, guidance for system administrators. [ bp: Add proper SPDX tags, touch ups by Josh and me. ] Co-developed-by: Antonio Gomez Iglesias Signed-off-by: Pawan Gupta Signed-off-by: Antonio Gomez Iglesias Signed-off-by: Borislav Petkov Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner Reviewed-by: Mark Gross Reviewed-by: Tony Luck Reviewed-by: Josh Poimboeuf

x86/tsx: Add "auto" option to the tsx= cmdline parameter

2019-10-28T07:37:00Z

Platforms which are not affected by X86_BUG_TAA may want the TSX feature enabled. Add "auto" option to the TSX cmdline parameter. When tsx=auto disable TSX when X86_BUG_TAA is present, otherwise enable TSX. More details on X86_BUG_TAA can be found here: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/hw-vuln/tsx_async_abort.html [ bp: Extend the arg buffer to accommodate "auto\0". ] Signed-off-by: Pawan Gupta Signed-off-by: Borislav Petkov Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner Reviewed-by: Tony Luck Reviewed-by: Josh Poimboeuf

x86/cpu: Add a "tsx=" cmdline option with TSX disabled by default

2019-10-28T07:36:58Z

Add a kernel cmdline parameter "tsx" to control the Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) feature. On CPUs that support TSX control, use "tsx=on|off" to enable or disable TSX. Not specifying this option is equivalent to "tsx=off". This is because on certain processors TSX may be used as a part of a speculative side channel attack. Carve out the TSX controlling functionality into a separate compilation unit because TSX is a CPU feature while the TSX async abort control machinery will go to cpu/bugs.c. [ bp: - Massage, shorten and clear the arg buffer. - Clarifications of the tsx= possible options - Josh. - Expand on TSX_CTRL availability - Pawan. ] Signed-off-by: Pawan Gupta Signed-off-by: Borislav Petkov Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner Reviewed-by: Josh Poimboeuf

Merge tag 'for-linus-5.4-rc3-tag' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/xen/tip

2019-10-12T21:11:21Z

Pull xen fixes from Juergen Gross: - correct panic handling when running as a Xen guest - cleanup the Xen grant driver to remove printing a pointer being always NULL - remove a soon to be wrong call of of_dma_configure() * tag 'for-linus-5.4-rc3-tag' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/xen/tip: xen: Stop abusing DT of_dma_configure API xen/grant-table: remove unnecessary printing x86/xen: Return from panic notifier

mm, memcg: proportional memory.{low,min} reclaim

2019-10-07T22:47:20Z

cgroup v2 introduces two memory protection thresholds: memory.low (best-effort) and memory.min (hard protection). While they generally do what they say on the tin, there is a limitation in their implementation that makes them difficult to use effectively: that cliff behaviour often manifests when they become eligible for reclaim. This patch implements more intuitive and usable behaviour, where we gradually mount more reclaim pressure as cgroups further and further exceed their protection thresholds. This cliff edge behaviour happens because we only choose whether or not to reclaim based on whether the memcg is within its protection limits (see the use of mem_cgroup_protected in shrink_node), but we don't vary our reclaim behaviour based on this information. Imagine the following timeline, with the numbers the lruvec size in this zone: 1. memory.low=1000000, memory.current=999999. 0 pages may be scanned. 2. memory.low=1000000, memory.current=1000000. 0 pages may be scanned. 3. memory.low=1000000, memory.current=1000001. 1000001* pages may be scanned. (?!) * Of course, we won't usually scan all available pages in the zone even without this patch because of scan control priority, over-reclaim protection, etc. However, as shown by the tests at the end, these techniques don't sufficiently throttle such an extreme change in input, so cliff-like behaviour isn't really averted by their existence alone. Here's an example of how this plays out in practice. At Facebook, we are trying to protect various workloads from "system" software, like configuration management tools, metric collectors, etc (see this[0] case study). In order to find a suitable memory.low value, we start by determining the expected memory range within which the workload will be comfortable operating. This isn't an exact science -- memory usage deemed "comfortable" will vary over time due to user behaviour, differences in composition of work, etc, etc. As such we need to ballpark memory.low, but doing this is currently problematic: 1. If we end up setting it too low for the workload, it won't have *any* effect (see discussion above). The group will receive the full weight of reclaim and won't have any priority while competing with the less important system software, as if we had no memory.low configured at all. 2. Because of this behaviour, we end up erring on the side of setting it too high, such that the comfort range is reliably covered. However, protected memory is completely unavailable to the rest of the system, so we might cause undue memory and IO pressure there when we *know* we have some elasticity in the workload. 3. Even if we get the value totally right, smack in the middle of the comfort zone, we get extreme jumps between no pressure and full pressure that cause unpredictable pressure spikes in the workload due to the current binary reclaim behaviour. With this patch, we can set it to our ballpark estimation without too much worry. Any undesirable behaviour, such as too much or too little reclaim pressure on the workload or system will be proportional to how far our estimation is off. This means we can set memory.low much more conservatively and thus waste less resources *without* the risk of the workload falling off a cliff if we overshoot. As a more abstract technical description, this unintuitive behaviour results in having to give high-priority workloads a large protection buffer on top of their expected usage to function reliably, as otherwise we have abrupt periods of dramatically increased memory pressure which hamper performance. Having to set these thresholds so high wastes resources and generally works against the principle of work conservation. In addition, having proportional memory reclaim behaviour has other benefits. Most notably, before this patch it's basically mandatory to set memory.low to a higher than desirable value because otherwise as soon as you exceed memory.low, all protection is lost, and all pages are eligible to scan again. By contrast, having a gradual ramp in reclaim pressure means that you now still get some protection when thresholds are exceeded, which means that one can now be more comfortable setting memory.low to lower values without worrying that all protection will be lost. This is important because workingset size is really hard to know exactly, especially with variable workloads, so at least getting *some* protection if your workingset size grows larger than you expect increases user confidence in setting memory.low without a huge buffer on top being needed. Thanks a lot to Johannes Weiner and Tejun Heo for their advice and assistance in thinking about how to make this work better. In testing these changes, I intended to verify that: 1. Changes in page scanning become gradual and proportional instead of binary. To test this, I experimented stepping further and further down memory.low protection on a workload that floats around 19G workingset when under memory.low protection, watching page scan rates for the workload cgroup: +------------+-----------------+--------------------+--------------+ | memory.low | test (pgscan/s) | control (pgscan/s) | % of control | +------------+-----------------+--------------------+--------------+ | 21G | 0 | 0 | N/A | | 17G | 867 | 3799 | 23% | | 12G | 1203 | 3543 | 34% | | 8G | 2534 | 3979 | 64% | | 4G | 3980 | 4147 | 96% | | 0 | 3799 | 3980 | 95% | +------------+-----------------+--------------------+--------------+ As you can see, the test kernel (with a kernel containing this patch) ramps up page scanning significantly more gradually than the control kernel (without this patch). 2. More gradual ramp up in reclaim aggression doesn't result in premature OOMs. To test this, I wrote a script that slowly increments the number of pages held by stress(1)'s --vm-keep mode until a production system entered severe overall memory contention. This script runs in a highly protected slice taking up the majority of available system memory. Watching vmstat revealed that page scanning continued essentially nominally between test and control, without causing forward reclaim progress to become arrested. [0]: https://facebookmicrosites.github.io/cgroup2/docs/overview.html#case-study-the-fbtax2-project [akpm@linux-foundation.org: reflow block comments to fit in 80 cols] [chris@chrisdown.name: handle cgroup_disable=memory when getting memcg protection] Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20190201045711.GA18302@chrisdown.name Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20190124014455.GA6396@chrisdown.name Signed-off-by: Chris Down Acked-by: Johannes Weiner Reviewed-by: Roman Gushchin Cc: Michal Hocko Cc: Tejun Heo Cc: Dennis Zhou Cc: Tetsuo Handa Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

x86/xen: Return from panic notifier

2019-10-07T21:53:30Z

Currently execution of panic() continues until Xen's panic notifier (xen_panic_event()) is called at which point we make a hypercall that never returns. This means that any notifier that is supposed to be called later as well as significant part of panic() code (such as pstore writes from kmsg_dump()) is never executed. There is no reason for xen_panic_event() to be this last point in execution since panic()'s emergency_restart() will call into xen_emergency_restart() from where we can perform our hypercall. Nevertheless, we will provide xen_legacy_crash boot option that will preserve original behavior during crash. This option could be used, for example, if running kernel dumper (which happens after panic notifiers) is undesirable. Reported-by: James Dingwall Signed-off-by: Boris Ostrovsky Reviewed-by: Juergen Gross