Our big and Prime clusters are currently getting software mitigations for Spectre variant 2 (CVE-2017-5715) applied through Trusted Firmware despite the presence of Arm v8.5-A hardware mitigations. Disable the software mitigations since they're redundant and are only hurting performance. Details and analysis: The Kryo cores used in the aforementioned clusters are semi-custom Cortex-A76 derivatives [1]. According to Arm, newer revisions of their reference Cortex-A76 designs (r3p0 and newer) are immune to Spectre v2 thanks to hardware mitigations implemented as part of Arm v8.5-A [2]. While I was unable to locate a working Spectre v2 PoC for AArch64, Arm's overview suggests that the v2 and v3(a) mitigations come together as part of the single Arm v8.5-A update [3], so we can test for whether the cores are susceptible to v2 by testing for their susceptibility to v3 and/or v3a. This is helpful because there *is* a public and working Spectre v3a PoC for AArch64 on GitHub [4]. Running the PoC revealed no conclusive successes for the v3 exploit, which should mean that our cores are also not vulnerable to Spectre v2. Variants 1 and 4 was not considered because Arm's documentation states that v1 and v4 mitigations are completely unrelated to those for v2 [5]. All PoC runs were conducted within a regular Android app's context with the app's processes locked to the big and Prime clusters (CPUs 4-7), since Arm states that the little cluster's cores (Cortex-A55) are not affected by any variants of Spectre [2]. [1] https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/qualcomm/snapdragon_800/855 [2] https://developer.arm.com/-/media/Arm%20Developer%20Community/PDF/Security%20update%2010%20September%2018/Kernel_Mitigations_Detail_v1.7.pdf?revision=730b8541-ca91-4fde-a2bb-4093054748ae [3] https://developer.arm.com/support/arm-security-updates/speculative-processor-vulnerability [4] https://github.com/lgeek/spec_poc_arm [5] https://developer.arm.com/-/media/Arm%20Developer%20Community/PDF/Security%20update%2010%20September%2018/Kernel_Mitigations_Detail_v1.7.pdf?revision=730b8541-ca91-4fde-a2bb-4093054748ae Signed-off-by: Danny Lin <danny@kdrag0n.dev> Change-Id: I4411899b7da9a7e1899ea7532e922c40bb077ab1fourteen
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