linux/Documentation/userspace-api/index.rst
Thomas Gleixner b617cfc858 prctl: Add speculation control prctls
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>
2018-05-03 13:55:50 +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`