Re: [PATCH 0/5] Introduce support for PSF mitigation

[Josh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@redhat.com>]

On Thu, Apr 08, 2021 at 09:56:47AM -0500, Saripalli, RK wrote:
> Josh, thank you for taking the time to review the patches.
> 
> On 4/7/2021 5:39 PM, Josh Poimboeuf wrote:
> > On Tue, Apr 06, 2021 at 10:49:59AM -0500, Ramakrishna Saripalli wrote:
> >> Because PSF speculation is limited to the current program context,
> >> the impact of bad PSF speculation is very similar to that of
> >> Speculative Store Bypass (Spectre v4)
> >>
> >> Predictive Store Forwarding controls:
> >> There are two hardware control bits which influence the PSF feature:
> >> - MSR 48h bit 2 – Speculative Store Bypass (SSBD)
> >> - MSR 48h bit 7 – Predictive Store Forwarding Disable (PSFD)
> >>
> >> The PSF feature is disabled if either of these bits are set.  These bits
> >> are controllable on a per-thread basis in an SMT system. By default, both
> >> SSBD and PSFD are 0 meaning that the speculation features are enabled.
> >>
> >> While the SSBD bit disables PSF and speculative store bypass, PSFD only
> >> disables PSF.
> >>
> >> PSFD may be desirable for software which is concerned with the
> >> speculative behavior of PSF but desires a smaller performance impact than
> >> setting SSBD.
> > 
> > Hi Ramakrishna,
> > 
> > Is there a realistic scenario where an application would want to disable
> > PSF, but not disable SSB?
> 
> It is possible most applications have been reviewed and scrubbed for
> SSB-type attacks but PSF-type issues may not have been looked at yet.

It's "possible", but is it realistic?  As far as I know, SSB is
impractical to scrub an application for.

Do we know of any real-world cases where this option is needed?

-- 
Josh