Linux 5.7 To Bring Mitigation For Intel Gen7 Ivybridge/Haswell "iGPU Leak"

Written by Michael Larabel in Intel on 14 March 2020 at 09:28 PM EDT. 5 Comments
INTEL
Back in January "iGPU Leak" was disclosed as CVE-2019-14615 as an information leakage vulnerability affecting Intel's graphics architecture leading to both register and local memory leaks. While Intel "Gen9" graphics were patched right away on the disclosure date and Gen8 Broadwell graphics were already mitigated, Gen7/Gen7.5 graphics took longer... In fact, not until the Linux 5.7 release this spring is there the mitigation for iGPU Leak.

On the January disclosure date the Intel open-source developers did post Gen7/Gen7.5 patches for Ivybridge/Haswell that killed the graphics performance. Given the hefty performance hits, the patches weren't merged to mainline.


But with further optimizations to these Gen7 era iGPU Leak patches, Intel was able to take care of the performance hit.


So now that iGPU Leak can be mitigated for these older CPUs without crippling the graphics performance, the security fix is forthcoming. As part of the Intel DRM-Next patches sent out on Friday is the Gen7 work to clear all EU/L3 residual contexts for mitigating this vulnerability. Therefore with Linux 5.7 the mitigation is in order and without hurting the graphics capabilities for these aging Intel processors.

The Gen7 iGPU Leak addressing is in the same pull request as effectively declaring Intel Tiger Lake "Gen12" graphics as stable. Fresh benchmarks forthcoming.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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