Files
linux/Documentation/userspace-api/index.rst
Thomas Gleixner 33f6a06810 prctl: Add speculation control prctls
commit b617cfc858 upstream

Add two new prctls to control aspects of speculation related vulnerabilites
and their mitigations to provide finer grained control over performance
impacting mitigations.

PR_GET_SPECULATION_CTRL returns the state of the speculation misfeature
which is selected with arg2 of prctl(2). The return value uses bit 0-2 with
the following meaning:

Bit  Define           Description
0    PR_SPEC_PRCTL    Mitigation can be controlled per task by
                      PR_SET_SPECULATION_CTRL
1    PR_SPEC_ENABLE   The speculation feature is enabled, mitigation is
                      disabled
2    PR_SPEC_DISABLE  The speculation feature is disabled, mitigation is
                      enabled

If all bits are 0 the CPU is not affected by the speculation misfeature.

If PR_SPEC_PRCTL is set, then the per task control of the mitigation is
available. If not set, prctl(PR_SET_SPECULATION_CTRL) for the speculation
misfeature will fail.

PR_SET_SPECULATION_CTRL allows to control the speculation misfeature, which
is selected by arg2 of prctl(2) per task. arg3 is used to hand in the
control value, i.e. either PR_SPEC_ENABLE or PR_SPEC_DISABLE.

The common return values are:

EINVAL  prctl is not implemented by the architecture or the unused prctl()
        arguments are not 0
ENODEV  arg2 is selecting a not supported speculation misfeature

PR_SET_SPECULATION_CTRL has these additional return values:

ERANGE  arg3 is incorrect, i.e. it's not either PR_SPEC_ENABLE or PR_SPEC_DISABLE
ENXIO   prctl control of the selected speculation misfeature is disabled

The first supported controlable speculation misfeature is
PR_SPEC_STORE_BYPASS. Add the define so this can be shared between
architectures.

Based on an initial patch from Tim Chen and mostly rewritten.

Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Reviewed-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
2018-05-22 18:54:03 +02:00

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=====================================
The Linux kernel user-space API guide
=====================================
.. _man-pages: https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
While much of the kernel's user-space API is documented elsewhere
(particularly in the man-pages_ project), some user-space information can
also be found in the kernel tree itself. This manual is intended to be the
place where this information is gathered.
.. class:: toc-title
Table of contents
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 2
no_new_privs
seccomp_filter
unshare
spec_ctrl
.. only:: subproject and html
Indices
=======
* :ref:`genindex`