x86/alternatives: Make JMPs more robust

Up until now we had to pay attention to relative JMPs in alternatives
about how their relative offset gets computed so that the jump target
is still correct. Or, as it is the case for near CALLs (opcode e8), we
still have to go and readjust the offset at patching time.

What is more, the static_cpu_has_safe() facility had to forcefully
generate 5-byte JMPs since we couldn't rely on the compiler to generate
properly sized ones so we had to force the longest ones. Worse than
that, sometimes it would generate a replacement JMP which is longer than
the original one, thus overwriting the beginning of the next instruction
at patching time.

So, in order to alleviate all that and make using JMPs more
straight-forward we go and pad the original instruction in an
alternative block with NOPs at build time, should the replacement(s) be
longer. This way, alternatives users shouldn't pay special attention
so that original and replacement instruction sizes are fine but the
assembler would simply add padding where needed and not do anything
otherwise.

As a second aspect, we go and recompute JMPs at patching time so that we
can try to make 5-byte JMPs into two-byte ones if possible. If not, we
still have to recompute the offsets as the replacement JMP gets put far
away in the .altinstr_replacement section leading to a wrong offset if
copied verbatim.

For example, on a locally generated kernel image

  old insn VA: 0xffffffff810014bd, CPU feat: X86_FEATURE_ALWAYS, size: 2
  __switch_to:
   ffffffff810014bd:      eb 21                   jmp ffffffff810014e0
  repl insn: size: 5
  ffffffff81d0b23c:       e9 b1 62 2f ff          jmpq ffffffff810014f2

gets corrected to a 2-byte JMP:

  apply_alternatives: feat: 3*32+21, old: (ffffffff810014bd, len: 2), repl: (ffffffff81d0b23c, len: 5)
  alt_insn: e9 b1 62 2f ff
  recompute_jumps: next_rip: ffffffff81d0b241, tgt_rip: ffffffff810014f2, new_displ: 0x00000033, ret len: 2
  converted to: eb 33 90 90 90

and a 5-byte JMP:

  old insn VA: 0xffffffff81001516, CPU feat: X86_FEATURE_ALWAYS, size: 2
  __switch_to:
   ffffffff81001516:      eb 30                   jmp ffffffff81001548
  repl insn: size: 5
   ffffffff81d0b241:      e9 10 63 2f ff          jmpq ffffffff81001556

gets shortened into a two-byte one:

  apply_alternatives: feat: 3*32+21, old: (ffffffff81001516, len: 2), repl: (ffffffff81d0b241, len: 5)
  alt_insn: e9 10 63 2f ff
  recompute_jumps: next_rip: ffffffff81d0b246, tgt_rip: ffffffff81001556, new_displ: 0x0000003e, ret len: 2
  converted to: eb 3e 90 90 90

... and so on.

This leads to a net win of around

40ish replacements * 3 bytes savings =~ 120 bytes of I$

on an AMD guest which means some savings of precious instruction cache
bandwidth. The padding to the shorter 2-byte JMPs are single-byte NOPs
which on smart microarchitectures means discarding NOPs at decode time
and thus freeing up execution bandwidth.

Signed-off-by: Borislav Petkov <bp@suse.de>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions