GitLab

commit 558c303c upstream.

Speculation attacks against some high-performance processors can
make use of branch history to influence future speculation.
When taking an exception from user-space, a sequence of branches
or a firmware call overwrites or invalidates the branch history.

The sequence of branches is added to the vectors, and should appear
before the first indirect branch. For systems using KPTI the sequence
is added to the kpti trampoline where it has a free register as the exit
from the trampoline is via a 'ret'. For systems not using KPTI, the same
register tricks are used to free up a register in the vectors.

For the firmware call, arch-workaround-3 clobbers 4 registers, so
there is no choice but to save them to the EL1 stack. This only happens
for entry from EL0, so if we take an exception due to the stack access,
it will not become re-entrant.

For KVM, the existing branch-predictor-hardening vectors...