commit 8974eb5882 upstream
Gather Data Sampling (GDS) is a hardware vulnerability which allows
unprivileged speculative access to data which was previously stored in
vector registers.
Intel processors that support AVX2 and AVX512 have gather instructions
that fetch non-contiguous data elements from memory. On vulnerable
hardware, when a gather instruction is transiently executed and
encounters a fault, stale data from architectural or internal vector
registers may get transiently stored to the destination vector
register allowing an attacker to infer the stale data using typical
side channel techniques like cache timing attacks.
This mitigation is different from many earlier ones for two reasons.
First, it is enabled by default and a bit must be set to *DISABLE* it.
This is the opposite of normal mitigation polarity. This means GDS can
be mitigated simply by updating microcode and leaving the new control
bit alone.
Second, GDS has a "lock" bit. This lock bit is there because the
mitigation affects the hardware security features KeyLocker and SGX.
It needs to be enabled and *STAY* enabled for these features to be
mitigated against GDS.
The mitigation is enabled in the microcode by default. Disable it by
setting gather_data_sampling=off or by disabling all mitigations with
mitigations=off. The mitigation status can be checked by reading:
/sys/devices/system/cpu/vulnerabilities/gather_data_sampling
Signed-off-by: Daniel Sneddon <daniel.sneddon@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com>
Acked-by: Josh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Daniel Sneddon <daniel.sneddon@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
348a89e201