[PATCH 8/9] arm64: alternatives: add shared NOP callback

Mark Rutland mark.rutland at arm.com
Thu Sep 1 08:14:02 PDT 2022


For each instance of an alternative, the compiler outputs a distinct
copy of the alternative instructions into a subsection. As the compiler
doesn't have special knowledge of alternatives, it cannot coalesce these
to save space.

In a defconfig kernel built with GCC 12.1.0, there are approximately
10,000 instances of alternative_has_feature_likely(), where the
replacement instruction is always a NOP. As NOPs are
position-independent, we don't need a unique copy per alternative
sequence.

This patch adds a callback to patch an alternative sequence with NOPs,
and make use of this in alternative_has_feature_likely(). So that this
can be used for other sites in future, this is written to patch multiple
instructions up to the original sequence length.

For NVHE, an alias is added to image-vars.h.

For modules, the callback is exported. Note that as modules are loaded
within 2GiB of the kernel, an alt_instr entry in a module can always
refer directly to the callback, and no special handling is necessary.

When building with GCC 12.1.0, the vmlinux is ~158KiB smaller, though
the resulting Image size is unchanged due to alignment constraints and
padding:

| % ls -al vmlinux-*
| -rwxr-xr-x 1 mark mark 134644592 Sep  1 14:52 vmlinux-after
| -rwxr-xr-x 1 mark mark 134486232 Sep  1 14:50 vmlinux-before
| % ls -al Image-*
| -rw-r--r-- 1 mark mark 37108224 Sep  1 14:52 Image-after
| -rw-r--r-- 1 mark mark 37108224 Sep  1 14:50 Image-before

Signed-off-by: Mark Rutland <mark.rutland at arm.com>
Cc: Ard Biesheuvel <ardb at kernel.org>
Cc: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas at arm.com>
Cc: James Morse <james.morse at arm.com>
Cc: Joey Gouly <joey.gouly at arm.com>
Cc: Marc Zyngier <maz at kernel.org>
Cc: Will Deacon <will at kernel.org>
---
 arch/arm64/include/asm/alternative-macros.h | 2 +-
 arch/arm64/kernel/alternative.c             | 8 ++++++++
 arch/arm64/kernel/image-vars.h              | 1 +
 3 files changed, 10 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/arch/arm64/include/asm/alternative-macros.h b/arch/arm64/include/asm/alternative-macros.h
index eaba9ec127897..4a2a98d6d2227 100644
--- a/arch/arm64/include/asm/alternative-macros.h
+++ b/arch/arm64/include/asm/alternative-macros.h
@@ -224,7 +224,7 @@ alternative_has_feature_likely(unsigned long feature)
 	BUILD_BUG_ON(feature >= ARM64_NCAPS);
 
 	asm_volatile_goto(
-	ALTERNATIVE("b	%l[l_no]", "nop", %[feature])
+	ALTERNATIVE_CB("b	%l[l_no]", %[feature], alt_cb_patch_nops)
 	:
 	: [feature] "i" (feature)
 	:
diff --git a/arch/arm64/kernel/alternative.c b/arch/arm64/kernel/alternative.c
index da706c9f9a9a5..122c59ce2772b 100644
--- a/arch/arm64/kernel/alternative.c
+++ b/arch/arm64/kernel/alternative.c
@@ -265,3 +265,11 @@ void apply_alternatives_module(void *start, size_t length)
 	__apply_alternatives(&region, true, &all_capabilities[0]);
 }
 #endif
+
+noinstr void alt_cb_patch_nops(struct alt_instr *alt, __le32 *origptr,
+			       __le32 *updptr, int nr_inst)
+{
+	for (int i = 0; i < nr_inst; i++)
+		updptr[i] = cpu_to_le32(aarch64_insn_gen_nop());
+}
+EXPORT_SYMBOL(alt_cb_patch_nops);
diff --git a/arch/arm64/kernel/image-vars.h b/arch/arm64/kernel/image-vars.h
index 118973a6ab053..4aaa5f3d1f65f 100644
--- a/arch/arm64/kernel/image-vars.h
+++ b/arch/arm64/kernel/image-vars.h
@@ -73,6 +73,7 @@ KVM_NVHE_ALIAS(spectre_bhb_patch_loop_iter);
 KVM_NVHE_ALIAS(spectre_bhb_patch_loop_mitigation_enable);
 KVM_NVHE_ALIAS(spectre_bhb_patch_wa3);
 KVM_NVHE_ALIAS(spectre_bhb_patch_clearbhb);
+KVM_NVHE_ALIAS(alt_cb_patch_nops);
 
 /* Global kernel state accessed by nVHE hyp code. */
 KVM_NVHE_ALIAS(kvm_vgic_global_state);
-- 
2.30.2




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