From a5201129307f414890f9a4410e38da205f5d7359 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Zachary Amsden Date: Sat, 3 Sep 2005 15:56:44 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] x86: make IOPL explicit The pushf/popf in switch_to are ONLY used to switch IOPL. Making this explicit in C code is more clear. This pushf/popf pair was added as a bugfix for leaking IOPL to unprivileged processes when using sysenter/sysexit based system calls (sysexit does not restore flags). When requesting an IOPL change in sys_iopl(), it is just as easy to change the current flags and the flags in the stack image (in case an IRET is required), but there is no reason to force an IRET if we came in from the SYSENTER path. This change is the minimal solution for supporting a paravirtualized Linux kernel that allows user processes to run with I/O privilege. Other solutions require radical rewrites of part of the low level fault / system call handling code, or do not fully support sysenter based system calls. Unfortunately, this added one field to the thread_struct. But as a bonus, on P4, the fastest time measured for switch_to() went from 312 to 260 cycles, a win of about 17% in the fast case through this performance critical path. Signed-off-by: Zachary Amsden Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds --- arch/i386/kernel/process.c | 6 ++++++ 1 file changed, 6 insertions(+) (limited to 'arch/i386/kernel/process.c') diff --git a/arch/i386/kernel/process.c b/arch/i386/kernel/process.c index 660997800393..b45cbf93d439 100644 --- a/arch/i386/kernel/process.c +++ b/arch/i386/kernel/process.c @@ -711,6 +711,12 @@ struct task_struct fastcall * __switch_to(struct task_struct *prev_p, struct tas if (prev->gs | next->gs) loadsegment(gs, next->gs); + /* + * Restore IOPL if needed. + */ + if (unlikely(prev->iopl != next->iopl)) + set_iopl_mask(next->iopl); + /* * Now maybe reload the debug registers */ -- cgit v1.2.3-55-g7522