Re: [PATCH 0/3] arch/x86: Optionally flush L1D on context switch

From: Singh, Balbir
Date: Thu Apr 02 2020 - 18:24:07 EST


On Thu, 2020-04-02 at 23:45 +0200, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
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> Josh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> > On Thu, Apr 02, 2020 at 08:35:46PM +0000, Singh, Balbir wrote:
> > > Yes, that CVE the motivation, the mitigation for CVE-2020-0550 does
> > > suggest
> > > flushing the cache on context switch. But in general, as we begin to
> > > find more
> > > ways of evicting data or snopping data, a generic mechanism is more
> > > useful and
> > > that is why I am making it an opt-in.
> >
> > Ok. I think it would be a good idea to expand on that justification
> > more precisely in the commit message. That would help both reviewers of
> > the code and users of the new option understand what level of paranoia
> > they're opting in to :-)
>
> The commit message is mostly useful for reviewers and people who have to
> do code archeaology.
>
> Documentation/admin-guide/hw-vuln/ has plenty of space to host a
> document with explanations. paranoia.rst comes to my mind. :)

I hope people don't go looking for aliens in there :) I'll write up some
documentation if that helps, starting with something simple.

Balbir

>
> Thanks,
>
> tglx
>