Pawan Gupta
027bbb884b
The enumeration of MD_CLEAR in CPUID(EAX=7,ECX=0).EDX{bit 10} is not an
accurate indicator on all CPUs of whether the VERW instruction will
overwrite fill buffers. FB_CLEAR enumeration in
IA32_ARCH_CAPABILITIES{bit 17} covers the case of CPUs that are not
vulnerable to MDS/TAA, indicating that microcode does overwrite fill
buffers.
Guests running in VMM environments may not be aware of all the
capabilities/vulnerabilities of the host CPU. Specifically, a guest may
apply MDS/TAA mitigations when a virtual CPU is enumerated as vulnerable
to MDS/TAA even when the physical CPU is not. On CPUs that enumerate
FB_CLEAR_CTRL the VMM may set FB_CLEAR_DIS to skip overwriting of fill
buffers by the VERW instruction. This is done by setting FB_CLEAR_DIS
during VMENTER and resetting on VMEXIT. For guests that enumerate
FB_CLEAR (explicitly asking for fill buffer clear capability) the VMM
will not use FB_CLEAR_DIS.
Irrespective of guest state, host overwrites CPU buffers before VMENTER
to protect itself from an MMIO capable guest, as part of mitigation for
MMIO Stale Data vulnerabilities.
Signed-off-by: Pawan Gupta <pawan.kumar.gupta@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Borislav Petkov <bp@suse.de>
Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.