x86 Straight-Line Speculation Mitigation Patches Updated For Linux

A year after Arm processors began mitigating straight-line speculation, Linux developers have been working on similar straight-line speculation mitigations for x86/x86_64 processors.

The past few months we have been seeing Linux kernel and GCC and LLVM/Clang patches around straight-line speculation mitigation for Intel / AMD processors. The issue at hand is over processors speculatively executing instructions linearly in memory past an unconditional change in control flow.

The compilers are adding a "mharden-sls" option to add INT3 instructions after function returns and indirect branches to protect against possible straight-line speculation. On kernel side, the patches being worked on are to make use of the SLS hardening option where present. The patches would enable this hardening when on a supported kernel version (GCC 12+ and presumably Clang 14+) and when using a kernel build with Retpolines (return trampolines) enabled. As this option controls the code generation, it would be just a build-time option and not controllable at run-time for the kernel.

Sent out on Saturday were the latest patches for the kernel around this SLS mitigation handling as mostly a refactoring of the prior proposed changes, which also includes the objtool changes for validating the SLS mitigation handling with speculation traps after indirect calls and RETs. As a known side effect, SLS mitigation for the kernel does increase the text size of the kernel build by around 2.4% due to the additional (INT3) instructions.