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PowerPC PLT speculative execution barriers

Alan Modra amodra@gmail.com
Fri Jan 19 12:01:00 GMT 2018 
On Fri, Jan 19, 2018 at 12:00:54AM -0800, Carlos O'Donell wrote:
> On 01/17/2018 12:19 AM, Alan Modra wrote:
> > Spectre variant 2 mitigation for PowerPC and PowerPC64.
> 
> This is a really terse description of something which is 
> quite complicated. Are you able to expand on this a bit and
> talk about what the patch is actually doing or conversely
> add more comments?

Well, as the subject says, the patch adds speculative execution
barriers in PLT call code.  That is accomplished by deliberately
mis-predicting the indirect jump, so as to make any processor
speculative execution head off somewhere safe.  As you might expect,
this will slow things down, so it isn't something you would want to
use in every application.

> This appears to change the size of the PLT entries. What does
> the final sequence look like? Does this have any knock-on 
> effects to disassemblers?

objdump will show you the new sequences.  Disassemblers are affected
only in the synthetic symbols placed on plt code, and there we are no
worse than we were before.  ie. they aren't very useful in showing
ppc64 plt code, or ppc32 pic.  Also, gold generates ppc32 plt code in
a different place to ld.bfd, so you don't get useful synthetic
symbols in gold binaries.  Use --emit-stub-syms.

> gdb?

Yes, gdb needs some changes.

-- 
Alan Modra
Australia Development Lab, IBM
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