This looks like a mechanism that allows more efficient use of CPU resources. You would still be able to schedule workloads on multiple cores as usual, but if they're all in the same "trusted" set, you can skip side-channel mitigations and recover performance. The system would still fall back to using the mitigations when you have too much work to be able to keep workload sets isolated via scheduling.

Sounds like the right approach. Hasn’t there been anything like this up till now?

You could do it by setting boot options that tell the Linux kernel to only make some of the CPU cores generally available, then run programs on the unused cores. That's a technique that developers of software with real-time requirements have used to make sure they have resources dedicated to their program.

How is this different from CPU pinning? I assume the side channel attack mitigations only happen during a context switch, so if you exclusively pin the core to an application, they shouldn't run anyway?

It seems to be dynamic.

CPU pinning means the pinned process always runs on the specified cores. If you instead group processes into trust domains, workloads can still be scheduled on arbitrary cores, but the scheduler can use the grouping information to arrange things such that it can skip the side-channel mitigations.

I think it's in fact CPU pinning while taking into account some basic security requirements.

In CPU pinning, the threads do not leave the assigned CPU-cores. So this is not exactly CPU pinning, it is a new "trusted" thread group scheduling implemented through cgroups where threads can move around CPU-cores as long as they end up in "trusted" groups of threads/processes. So, if two non trusted threads are to be scheduled, they won't be in the same CPU-core/CPU/resource/etc.

* Edited for clarification

Is it that easy to turn mitigations on/off? I thought much of it required recompile.

I think it's just some kernel command-line switches. Like `mitigations=off`.

there is the handy https://make-linux-fast-again.com/

That requires reboot and is just the kernel part - so still not easy enough to flip on/off depending on task scheduling.

In embedded systems we often want to dedicate one core to the safety critical parts. It is a major bug if that core is every more than 40% busy (exact number varies, the important part is to leave plenty of headroom in case the real world is more complex than your test situations). We don't care is the ui core gets busy and as a result has lag. (sometimes there is safety ui running on the not busy core)

You can to that on Linux today quite easily. All one has to do is booting the kernel with an appropriate "isolcpus"-parameter on its cmdline, and then "manually" scheduling processes onto the isolated cores/CPUs.

isolcpus sadly isn't complete - some kernel tasks still get scheduled.

There was some stuff to improve this - https://lwn.net/Articles/816298/ - but it wasn't merged into mainline.

There's benchmarks in the mailing list.

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20201117232003.3580179-1-joel@j...

We've known about side-channel attacks on SMP/hyperthreading implementations since Intel started selling chips with the technology. That's back in 2005. The rest of the industry more or less slept on it until someone gave side channel attacks a cool name and logo to worry about.

Amazon had just recently or was about to release S3, so cloud computing wasn't as much of a thing back then. The oh shit factor of today is because now business that have absolutely no relation to each other are now sharing CPU cores.

Shared hosting has been a thing for a lot longer though. Wouldn't that have been exposed to the same set of vulnerabilities though? I suppose there were lower hanging fruit to exploit though.

In 2005 if your bank rocked up to their regulator explaining that they wanted shared hosting of their financial systems on commodity hosting providers they would have been told to reconsider or lose their banking license.

Now it's carte-blanche to have core financial systems on Amazon, running alongside EC2 instances purchased with stolen credit cards by folks in non-extradition countries.

Any way, this just confirms the long disregarded notion that it is not possible to execute untrusted code without extreme level of considerations for hardware isolation.

In other words: any kind of "cloud" thing, or any hosted computations are at inherent risk of abuse from ISA level attacks.

AMD EPYC enables this and Google has GA'd it, soon will also GA confidential GKE.

This method was talked about since the Spectre/Meltdown days. It has often taken Google much longer to release patches they've been sitting on, e.g. many original containers patches were like this.

Why didn’t Intel do it then?

Do what exactly? This is essentially a performance optimization for folk bagholding oceans of vulnerable hardware

It should work. Who would trust Intel in this?

OpenBSD was sufficiently aware of this kind of thing to disable SMT completely back in mid 2018:

https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg9...

The vulnerabilities (MDS etc) were published in early 2019. There were some mitigations, in both kernels and browsers, but they were and are not 100%, the only 100% mitigation is still to disable SMT. Do you really want to do that? Most people it seems aren't willing to give up SMT.

This patchset for Linux was originally proposed over 20 months ago:

https://lwn.net/Articles/780703/

After refining and optimizing this patch set for quite a while, it's just about as fast as ... just disabling SMT completely (which is a lot simpler). The complexity this adds to the scheduler costs that much.

People/companies really love the _idea_ of getting _all_ the performance of SMT and _all_ the security of mitigations, and don't care as much that you actually still can't have both, so this will be merged eventually.

> I can imagine most of a powerful core's performance going unused if the operating system isn't doing anything special and a multithreaded workload is trying to get a lot of work done.

The documentation for this patchset seems to say that threads running in the same address space will be allowed to share core resources as a default, even when core scheduling is enabled - which seems sensible. A separate mechanism is provided to alter this behavior.