Fwd: A more general possible meltdown/spectre countermeasure

[Wojciech Puchar]

> The only workaround that's completely effective is to unmap all of kernel memory when running in userland. It's a bit tricky because

this means on every syscall on interrupt:

- memcopy part of top level PTE on enter, bzero on exit
- TLB flush both on enter and exit.

IMHO it would make much more than 30% overhead in many cases. am i wrong?

> there's small parts that have to stay mapped for various architectural reasons. This means KASLR on these CPUs likely can never be
> effective since meltdown will let you find what the trap address is and from that find the kernel (though there's some rumblings
> that the indirection Linux is doing will suffice).
> 
> Warner
> 
>