There is a general consensus that TSX usage is not largely spread while
the history shows there is a non trivial space for side channel attacks
possible. Therefore the tsx is disabled by default even on platforms
that might have a safe implementation of TSX according to the current
knowledge. This is a fair trade off to make.
There are, however, workloads that really do benefit from using TSX and
updating to a newer kernel with TSX disabled might introduce a
noticeable regressions. This would be especially a problem for Linux
distributions which will provide TAA mitigations.
Introduce config options X86_INTEL_TSX_MODE_OFF, X86_INTEL_TSX_MODE_ON
and X86_INTEL_TSX_MODE_AUTO to control the TSX feature. The config
setting can be overridden by the tsx cmdline options.
[ bp: Text cleanups from Josh. ]
Suggested-by: Borislav Petkov <bpetkov@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Signed-off-by: Pawan Gupta <pawan.kumar.gupta@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Borislav Petkov <bp@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Reviewed-by: Josh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@redhat.com>
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 <pawan.kumar.gupta@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Borislav Petkov <bp@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Reviewed-by: Josh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@redhat.com>
