On Thu, 2025-03-13 at 18:21 +0100, Luis Gerhorst wrote:

This improves the expressiveness of unprivileged BPF by inserting
speculation barriers instead of rejecting the programs.

The approach was previously presented at LPC'24 [1] and RAID'24 [2].

To mitigate the Spectre v1 (PHT) vulnerability, the kernel rejects
potentially-dangerous unprivileged BPF programs as of
commit 9183671af6db ("bpf: Fix leakage under speculation on mispredicted
branches"). In [2], we have analyzed 364 object files from open source
projects (Linux Samples and Selftests, BCC, Loxilb, Cilium, libbpf
Examples, Parca, and Prevail) and found that this affects 31% to 54% of
programs.

To resolve this in the majority of cases this patchset adds a fall-back
for mitigating Spectre v1 using speculation barriers. The kernel still
optimistically attempts to verify all speculative paths but uses
speculation barriers against v1 when unsafe behavior is detected. This
allows for more programs to be accepted without disabling the BPF
Spectre mitigations (e.g., by setting cpu_mitigations_off()).

In [1] we have measured the overhead of this approach relative to having
mitigations off and including the upstream Spectre v4 mitigations. For
event tracing and stack-sampling profilers, we found that mitigations
increase BPF program execution time by 0% to 62%. For the Loxilb network
load balancer, we have measured a 14% slowdown in SCTP performance but
no significant slowdown for TCP. This overhead only applies to programs
that were previously rejected.

I reran the expressiveness-evaluation with v6.14 and made sure the main
results still match those from [1] and [2] (which used v6.5).

Main design decisions are:

* Do not use separate bytecode insns for v1 and v4 barriers. This
  simplifies the verifier significantly and has the only downside that
  performance on PowerPC is not as high as it could be.

* Allow archs to still disable v1/v4 mitigations separately by setting
  bpf_jit_bypass_spec_v1/v4(). This has the benefit that archs can
  benefit from improved BPF expressiveness / performance if they are not
  vulnerable (e.g., ARM64 for v4 in the kernel).

* Do not remove the empty BPF_NOSPEC implementation for backends for
  which it is unknown whether they are vulnerable to Spectre v1.

[...]

I think it would be good to have some tests checking that nospec
instructions are inserted in expected locations.
Could you please take look at use of __xlated tag in e.g.
tools/testing/selftests/bpf/progs/verifier_sdiv.c ?

[...]