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Commit 34bfab0e authored by Borislav Petkov's avatar Borislav Petkov Committed by Ingo Molnar
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x86/alternatives: Do not use sync_core() to serialize I$



We use sync_core() in the alternatives code to stop speculative
execution of prefetched instructions because we are potentially changing
them and don't want to execute stale bytes.

What it does on most machines is call CPUID which is a serializing
instruction. And that's expensive.

However, the instruction cache is serialized when we're on the local CPU
and are changing the data through the same virtual address. So then, we
don't need the serializing CPUID but a simple control flow change. Last
being accomplished with a CALL/RET which the noinline causes.

Suggested-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarBorislav Petkov <bp@suse.de>
Reviewed-by: default avatarAndy Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org>
Cc: Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@citrix.com>
Cc: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>
Cc: Brian Gerst <brgerst@gmail.com>
Cc: Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh@hmh.eng.br>
Cc: Matthew Whitehead <tedheadster@gmail.com>
Cc: One Thousand Gnomes <gnomes@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20161203150258.vwr5zzco7ctgc4pe@pd.tnic


Signed-off-by: default avatarIngo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
parent a268b5f1
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