x86/cpu: Probe the behavior of nulling out a segment at boot time

AMD and Intel do different things when writing zero to a segment
selector.  Since neither vendor documents the behavior well and it's
easy to test the behavior, try nulling fs to see what happens.

Signed-off-by: Andy Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Borislav Petkov <bp@suse.de>
Cc: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>
Cc: Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de>
Cc: Brian Gerst <brgerst@gmail.com>
Cc: Denys Vlasenko <dvlasenk@redhat.com>
Cc: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Rudolf Marek <r.marek@assembler.cz>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/61588ba0e0df35beafd363dc8b68a4c5878ef095.1460075211.git.luto@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>

1 files changed, 31 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/arch/x86/kernel/cpu/common.c b/arch/x86/kernel/cpu/common.c
index 7fea4079d102..8e40eee5843a 100644
--- a/arch/x86/kernel/cpu/common.c
+++ b/arch/x86/kernel/cpu/common.c
@@ -889,6 +889,35 @@ static void detect_nopl(struct cpuinfo_x86 *c)
 #endif
 }
 
+static void detect_null_seg_behavior(struct cpuinfo_x86 *c)
+{
+#ifdef CONFIG_X86_64
+        /*
+         * Empirically, writing zero to a segment selector on AMD does
+         * not clear the base, whereas writing zero to a segment
+         * selector on Intel does clear the base.  Intel's behavior
+         * allows slightly faster context switches in the common case
+         * where GS is unused by the prev and next threads.
+         *
+         * Since neither vendor documents this anywhere that I can see,
+         * detect it directly instead of hardcoding the choice by
+         * vendor.
+         *
+         * I've designated AMD's behavior as the "bug" because it's
+         * counterintuitive and less friendly.
+         */
+
+        unsigned long old_base, tmp;
+        rdmsrl(MSR_FS_BASE, old_base);
+        wrmsrl(MSR_FS_BASE, 1);
+        loadsegment(fs, 0);
+        rdmsrl(MSR_FS_BASE, tmp);
+        if (tmp != 0)
+                set_cpu_bug(c, X86_BUG_NULL_SEG);
+        wrmsrl(MSR_FS_BASE, old_base);
+#endif
+}
+
 static void generic_identify(struct cpuinfo_x86 *c)
 {
         c->extended_cpuid_level = 0;
@@ -921,6 +950,8 @@ static void generic_identify(struct cpuinfo_x86 *c)
         get_model_name(c); /* Default name */
 
         detect_nopl(c);
+
+        detect_null_seg_behavior(c);
 }
 
 static void x86_init_cache_qos(struct cpuinfo_x86 *c)