Future Intel processors will support "Enhanced IBRS" which is an "always
on" mode i.e. IBRS bit in SPEC_CTRL MSR is enabled once and never
disabled.

From the specification [1]:

 "With enhanced IBRS, the predicted targets of indirect branches
  executed cannot be controlled by software that was executed in a less
  privileged predictor mode or on another logical processor. As a
  result, software operating on a processor with enhanced IBRS need not
  use WRMSR to set IA32_SPEC_CTRL.IBRS after every transition to a more
  privileged predictor mode. Software can isolate predictor modes
  effectively simply by setting the bit once. Software need not disable
  enhanced IBRS prior to entering a sleep state such as MWAIT or HLT."

If Enhanced IBRS is supported by the processor then use it as the
preferred spectre v2 mitigation mechanism instead of Retpoline. Intel's
Retpoline white paper [2] states:

 "Retpoline is known to be an effective branch target injection (Spectre
  variant 2) mitigation on Intel processors belonging to family 6
  (enumerated by the CPUID instruction) that do not have support for
  enhanced IBRS. On processors that support enhanced IBRS, it should be
  used for mitigation instead of retpoline."

The reason why Enhanced IBRS is the recommended mitigation on processors
which support it is that these processors also support CET which
provides a defense against ROP attacks. Retpoline is very similar to ROP
techniques and might trigger false positives in the CET defense.

If Enhanced IBRS is selected as the mitigation technique for spectre v2,
the IBRS bit in SPEC_CTRL MSR is set once at boot time and never
cleared. Kernel also has to make sure that IBRS bit remains set after
VMEXIT because the guest might have cleared the bit. This is already
covered by the existing x86_spec_ctrl_set_guest() and
x86_spec_ctrl_restore_host() speculation control functions.

Enhanced IBRS still requires IBPB for full mitigation.

[1] Speculative-Execution-Side-Channel-Mitigations.pdf
[2] Retpoline-A-Branch-Target-Injection-Mitigation.pdf
Both documents are available at:
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=199511Originally-by: David Woodhouse <dwmw@amazon.co.uk>
Signed-off-by: Sai Praneeth Prakhya <sai.praneeth.prakhya@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Tim C Chen <tim.c.chen@intel.com>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com>
Cc: Ravi Shankar <ravi.v.shankar@intel.com>
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/1533148945-24095-1-git-send-email-sai.praneeth.prakhya@intel.com