[PATCH] arm64: explicitly disable pointer authentication instructions

[Peng Fan]

On 8/8/2022 10:12 PM, Rasmus Villemoes wrote:
> The Yocto project builds their aarch64 cross-compiler with the
> configure knob --enable-standard-branch-protection, which means that
> their gcc behaves as if -mbranch-protection=standard is passed; the
> default (lacking that configure knob) is -mbranch-protection=none.
> 
> This means that when building U-Boot using the Yocto toolchain, most
> functions end up containing paciasp/autiasp/bti instructions. However,
> since U-Boot is not an ordinary userspace application, there's no OS
> kernel which has set up the required authentication keys, so these
> instructions do nothing at all (even on arm64 hardware that does have
> the pointer authentication capability). They do however make the image
> larger.
> 
> It is theoretically possible for U-Boot to make use of the pointer
> authentication protection - cf. the linux kernel's
> CONFIG_ARM64_PTR_AUTH_KERNEL - but it is far from trivial, and it's
> hard to see just what threat model it would protect against in a
> bootloader context. Regardless, we certainly have none of the required
> infrastructure now, so explictly pass -mbranch-protection=none to
> ensure those useless instructions do not get emitted.
> 
> For a toolchain not configured with
> --enable-standard-branch-protection, this changes nothing. For the
> Yocto toolchain, this reduces the size of both SPL and U-Boot proper
> by about 3% for my imx8mp target.
> 
> If you don't have a Yocto toolchain, the effect can easily be
> reproduced by applying this patch and changing =none to =standard.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Rasmus Villemoes <rasmus.villemoes at prevas.dk>

If U-Boot runs on top of hypervisor, would it still be needed?

Regards,
Peng.

> ---
> Not sure who to cc, there's no overall arm64 maintainer listed in
> MAINTAINERS, but Tom is listed as generally handling arch/arm/.
> 
>   arch/arm/cpu/armv8/config.mk | 1 +
>   1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
> 
> diff --git a/arch/arm/cpu/armv8/config.mk b/arch/arm/cpu/armv8/config.mk
> index 6f9093109f..ca06ed3d4f 100644
> --- a/arch/arm/cpu/armv8/config.mk
> +++ b/arch/arm/cpu/armv8/config.mk
> @@ -3,6 +3,7 @@
>   # (C) Copyright 2002
>   # Gary Jennejohn, DENX Software Engineering, <garyj at denx.de>
>   PLATFORM_RELFLAGS += -fno-common -ffixed-x18
> +PLATFORM_RELFLAGS += $(call cc-option,-mbranch-protection=none)
>   
>   PF_NO_UNALIGNED := $(call cc-option, -mstrict-align)
>   PLATFORM_CPPFLAGS += $(PF_NO_UNALIGNED)