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Thomas Gleixner authored
The Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) vulernabilities are mitigated by clearing the affected CPU buffers. The mechanism for clearing the buffers uses the unused and obsolete VERW instruction in combination with a microcode update which triggers a CPU buffer clear when VERW is executed. Provide a inline function with the assembly magic. The argument of the VERW instruction must be a memory operand as documented: "MD_CLEAR enumerates that the memory-operand variant of VERW (for example, VERW m16) has been extended to also overwrite buffers affected by MDS. This buffer overwriting functionality is not guaranteed for the register operand variant of VERW." Documentation also recommends to use a writable data segment selector: "The buffer overwriting occurs regardless of the result of the VERW permission check, as well as when the selector is null or causes a descriptor load segment violation. However, for lowest latency we recommend using a selector that indicates a valid writable data segment." Add x86 specific documentation about MDS and the internal workings of the mitigation. Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> Reviewed-by: Borislav Petkov <bp@suse.de> Reviewed-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org> Reviewed-by: Frederic Weisbecker <frederic@kernel.org> Reviewed-by: Jon Masters <jcm@redhat.com> Tested-by: Jon Masters <jcm@redhat.com>
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