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Mathias Krause d292035fb5 KVM: VMX: Make CR4.CET a guest owned bit
Make CR4.CET a guest-owned bit under VMX by extending
KVM_POSSIBLE_CR4_GUEST_BITS accordingly.

There's no need to intercept changes to CR4.CET, as it's neither
included in KVM's MMU role bits, nor does KVM specifically care about
the actual value of a (nested) guest's CR4.CET value, beside for
enforcing architectural constraints, i.e. make sure that CR0.WP=1 if
CR4.CET=1.

Intercepting writes to CR4.CET is particularly bad for grsecurity
kernels with KERNEXEC or, even worse, KERNSEAL enabled. These features
heavily make use of read-only kernel objects and use a cpu-local CR0.WP
toggle to override it, when needed. Under a CET-enabled kernel, this
also requires toggling CR4.CET, hence the motivation to make it
guest-owned.

Using the old test from [1] gives the following runtime numbers (perf
stat -r 5 ssdd 10 50000):

* grsec guest on linux-6.16-rc5 + cet patches:
  2.4647 +- 0.0706 seconds time elapsed  ( +-  2.86% )

* grsec guest on linux-6.16-rc5 + cet patches + CR4.CET guest-owned:
  1.5648 +- 0.0240 seconds time elapsed  ( +-  1.53% )

Not only does not intercepting CR4.CET make the test run ~35% faster,
it's also more stable with less fluctuation due to fewer VMEXITs.

Therefore, make CR4.CET a guest-owned bit where possible.

This change is VMX-specific, as SVM has no such fine-grained control
register intercept control.

If KVM's assumptions regarding MMU role handling wrt. a guest's CR4.CET
value ever change, the BUILD_BUG_ON()s related to KVM_MMU_CR4_ROLE_BITS
and KVM_POSSIBLE_CR4_GUEST_BITS will catch that early.

Link: https://lore.kernel.org/kvm/20230322013731.102955-1-minipli@grsecurity.net/ [1]
Reviewed-by: Chao Gao <chao.gao@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Mathias Krause <minipli@grsecurity.net>
Reviewed-by: Binbin Wu <binbin.wu@linux.intel.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20250919223258.1604852-52-seanjc@google.com
Signed-off-by: Sean Christopherson <seanjc@google.com>
History 2025-09-23 10:03:09 -07:00
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Linux kernel
============

There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.

In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
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    https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/

There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the reStructuredText markup notation.

Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
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