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The Spectre-v1 mitigations made "access_ok()" much more expensive, since
it has to serialize execution with the test for a valid user address.
All the normal user copy routines avoid this by just masking the user
address with a data-dependent mask instead, but the fast
"unsafe_user_read()" kind of patterms that were supposed to be a fast
case got slowed down.
This introduces a notion of using
src = masked_user_access_begin(src);
to do the user address sanity using a data-dependent mask instead of the
more traditional conditional
if (user_read_access_begin(src, len)) {
model.
This model only works for dense accesses that start at 'src' and on
architectures that have a guard region that is guaranteed to fault in
between the user space and the kernel space area.
With this, the user access doesn't need to be manually checked, because
a bad address is guaranteed to fault (by some architecture masking
trick: on x86-64 this involves just turning an invalid user address into
all ones, since we don't map the top of address space).
This only converts a couple of examples for now. Example x86-64 code
generation for loading two words from user space:
stac
mov %rax,%rcx
sar $0x3f,%rcx
or %rax,%rcx
mov (%rcx),%r13
mov 0x8(%rcx),%r14
clac
where all the error handling and -EFAULT is now purely handled out of
line by the exception path.
Of course, if the micro-architecture does badly at 'clac' and 'stac',
the above is still pitifully slow. But at least we did as well as we
could.
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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 reStructuredText 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.