[U-Boot] [PATCH 2/4] ARM: Introduce ability to enable invalidate of BTB with ICIALLU on Cortex-A15 for CVE-2017-5715

[Nishanth Menon]

On 00:30-20180613, Florian Fainelli wrote:
> On June 12, 2018 1:24:09 PM PDT, Nishanth Menon <nm at ti.com> wrote:
> >As recommended by Arm in [1], ACTLR[0] (Enable invalidates of BTB)
> >needs to be set[2] for BTB to be invalidated on ICIALLU. This needs to
> >be done unconditionally for Cortex-A15 processors. Provide a config
> >option for platforms to enable this option based on impact analysis
> >for products.
> >
> >NOTE: This patch in itself is NOT the final solution, this requires:
> >a) Implementation of v7_arch_cp15_set_acr on SoCs which may not
> >   provide direct access to ACR register.
> >b) Operating Systems such as Linux to provide adequate workaround in
> >the
> >   right locations.
> 
> This is the case as of 4.18 so you could probably reference CONFIG_CPU_SPECTRE and CONFIG_HARDEN_BRANCH_PREDICTOR in a v2.

Did'nt want to tie the description too deep to Linux specifics.. Linux
documents itself and users are encouraged to read that documentation,
correct?

> 
> >c) This workaround applies to only the boot processor. It is important
> >   to apply workaround as necessary (context-save-restore) around low
> >   power context loss OR additional processors as necessary in either
> >   firmware support OR elsewhere in OS.
> 
> About that, I don't know enough of uboot but are there existing PSCI or
> other seemingly standard secondary core support in uboot that would make
> us go through the same initialization as the boot CPU? If not, is
> everything going to be largely implementation specific and
> scattered between uboot and the hypervisors or kernel?

in ARMV7 SoCs, unfortunately, we lived in a world of no-exact-standard.
even within TI, Few of the SoCs use PSCI, others did implement custom
SMC calls (since they existed in an architecture prior to PSCI).

> 
> FWIW, this is what prompted me to submit this:
> 
> https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/10453643/

That wont work in a generic manner for precisely the same reason I had to do
it with weak function in u-boot (some SoCs will only permit 'mcr
p15, 0, r0, c1, c0, 1' in secure world and you need to make a custom smc
call to make it happen). Unfortunately, IMHO, at least at this
point, there'd be custom implementations per SoC and layers depending on
where to implement it.

-- 
Regards,
Nishanth Menon