[PATCH v4 2/2] arm64: mm: install KPTI nG mappings with MMU enabled

[Ard Biesheuvel]

On Thu, 9 Jun 2022 at 16:50, Ard Biesheuvel <ardb at kernel.org> wrote:
>
> In cases where we unmap the kernel while running in user space, we rely
> on ASIDs to distinguish the minimal trampoline from the full kernel
> mapping, and this means we must use non-global attributes for those
> mappings, to ensure they are scoped by ASID and will not hit in the TLB
> inadvertently.
>
> We only do this when needed, as this is generally more costly in terms
> of TLB pressure, and so we boot without these non-global attributes, and
> apply them to all existing kernel mappings once all CPUs are up and we
> know whether or not the non-global attributes are needed. At this point,
> we cannot simply unmap and remap the entire address space, so we have to
> update all existing block and page descriptors in place.
>
> Currently, we go through a lot of trouble to perform these updates with
> the MMU and caches off, to avoid violating break before make (BBM) rules
> imposed by the architecture. Since we make changes to page tables that
> are not covered by the ID map, we gain access to those descriptors by
> disabling translations altogether. This means that the stores to memory
> are issued with device attributes, and require extra care in terms of
> coherency, which is costly. We also rely on the ID map to access a
> shared flag, which requires the ID map to be executable and writable at
> the same time, which is another thing we'd prefer to avoid.
>
> So let's switch to an approach where we replace the kernel mapping with
> a minimal mapping of a few pages that can be used for a minimal, ad-hoc
> fixmap that we can use to map each page table in turn as we traverse the
> hierarchy.
>
> Signed-off-by: Ard Biesheuvel <ardb at kernel.org>

Ugh this patch is broken - please disregard.