Merge branch 'l1tf-final' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/tip

Merge L1 Terminal Fault fixes from Thomas Gleixner:
 "L1TF, aka L1 Terminal Fault, is yet another speculative hardware
  engineering trainwreck. It's a hardware vulnerability which allows
  unprivileged speculative access to data which is available in the
  Level 1 Data Cache when the page table entry controlling the virtual
  address, which is used for the access, has the Present bit cleared or
  other reserved bits set.

  If an instruction accesses a virtual address for which the relevant
  page table entry (PTE) has the Present bit cleared or other reserved
  bits set, then speculative execution ignores the invalid PTE and loads
  the referenced data if it is present in the Level 1 Data Cache, as if
  the page referenced by the address bits in the PTE was still present
  and accessible.

  While this is a purely speculative mechanism and the instruction will
  raise a page fault when it is retired eventually, the pure act of
  loading the data and making it available to other speculative
  instructions opens up the opportunity for side channel attacks to
  unprivileged malicious code, similar to the Meltdown attack.

  While Meltdown breaks the user space to kernel space protection, L1TF
  allows to attack any physical memory address in the system and the
  attack works across all protection domains. It allows an attack of SGX
  and also works from inside virtual machines because the speculation
  bypasses the extended page table (EPT) protection mechanism.

  The assoicated CVEs are: CVE-2018-3615, CVE-2018-3620, CVE-2018-3646

  The mitigations provided by this pull request include:

   - Host side protection by inverting the upper address bits of a non
     present page table entry so the entry points to uncacheable memory.

   - Hypervisor protection by flushing L1 Data Cache on VMENTER.

   - SMT (HyperThreading) control knobs, which allow to 'turn off' SMT
     by offlining the sibling CPU threads. The knobs are available on
     the kernel command line and at runtime via sysfs

   - Control knobs for the hypervisor mitigation, related to L1D flush
     and SMT control. The knobs are available on the kernel command line
     and at runtime via sysfs

   - Extensive documentation about L1TF including various degrees of
     mitigations.

  Thanks to all people who have contributed to this in various ways -
  patches, review, testing, backporting - and the fruitful, sometimes
  heated, but at the end constructive discussions.

  There is work in progress to provide other forms of mitigations, which
  might be less horrible performance wise for a particular kind of
  workloads, but this is not yet ready for consumption due to their
  complexity and limitations"

* 'l1tf-final' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/tip: (75 commits)
  x86/microcode: Allow late microcode loading with SMT disabled
  tools headers: Synchronise x86 cpufeatures.h for L1TF additions
  x86/mm/kmmio: Make the tracer robust against L1TF
  x86/mm/pat: Make set_memory_np() L1TF safe
  x86/speculation/l1tf: Make pmd/pud_mknotpresent() invert
  x86/speculation/l1tf: Invert all not present mappings
  cpu/hotplug: Fix SMT supported evaluation
  KVM: VMX: Tell the nested hypervisor to skip L1D flush on vmentry
  x86/speculation: Use ARCH_CAPABILITIES to skip L1D flush on vmentry
  x86/speculation: Simplify sysfs report of VMX L1TF vulnerability
  Documentation/l1tf: Remove Yonah processors from not vulnerable list
  x86/KVM/VMX: Don't set l1tf_flush_l1d from vmx_handle_external_intr()
  x86/irq: Let interrupt handlers set kvm_cpu_l1tf_flush_l1d
  x86: Don't include linux/irq.h from asm/hardirq.h
  x86/KVM/VMX: Introduce per-host-cpu analogue of l1tf_flush_l1d
  x86/irq: Demote irq_cpustat_t::__softirq_pending to u16
  x86/KVM/VMX: Move the l1tf_flush_l1d test to vmx_l1d_flush()
  x86/KVM/VMX: Replace 'vmx_l1d_flush_always' with 'vmx_l1d_flush_cond'
  x86/KVM/VMX: Don't set l1tf_flush_l1d to true from vmx_l1d_flush()
  cpu/hotplug: detect SMT disabled by BIOS
  ...

3 files changed, 697 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/index.rst b/Documentation/admin-guide/index.rst
index 48d70af11652..0873685bab0f 100644
--- a/Documentation/admin-guide/index.rst
+++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/index.rst
@@ -17,6 +17,15 @@ etc.
    kernel-parameters
    devices
 
+This section describes CPU vulnerabilities and provides an overview of the
+possible mitigations along with guidance for selecting mitigations if they
+are configurable at compile, boot or run time.
+
+.. toctree::
+   :maxdepth: 1
+
+   l1tf
+
 Here is a set of documents aimed at users who are trying to track down
 problems and bugs in particular.
 
diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt b/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt
index 5cde1ff32ff3..5a67e409d370 100644
--- a/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt
+++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt
@@ -1967,10 +1967,84 @@
 			(virtualized real and unpaged mode) on capable
 			Intel chips. Default is 1 (enabled)
 
+	kvm-intel.vmentry_l1d_flush=[KVM,Intel] Mitigation for L1 Terminal Fault
+			CVE-2018-3620.
+
+			Valid arguments: never, cond, always
+
+			always: L1D cache flush on every VMENTER.
+			cond:	Flush L1D on VMENTER only when the code between
+				VMEXIT and VMENTER can leak host memory.
+			never:	Disables the mitigation
+
+			Default is cond (do L1 cache flush in specific instances)
+
 	kvm-intel.vpid=	[KVM,Intel] Disable Virtual Processor Identification
 			feature (tagged TLBs) on capable Intel chips.
 			Default is 1 (enabled)
 
+	l1tf=           [X86] Control mitigation of the L1TF vulnerability on
+			      affected CPUs
+
+			The kernel PTE inversion protection is unconditionally
+			enabled and cannot be disabled.
+
+			full
+				Provides all available mitigations for the
+				L1TF vulnerability. Disables SMT and
+				enables all mitigations in the
+				hypervisors, i.e. unconditional L1D flush.
+
+				SMT control and L1D flush control via the
+				sysfs interface is still possible after
+				boot.  Hypervisors will issue a warning
+				when the first VM is started in a
+				potentially insecure configuration,
+				i.e. SMT enabled or L1D flush disabled.
+
+			full,force
+				Same as 'full', but disables SMT and L1D
+				flush runtime control. Implies the
+				'nosmt=force' command line option.
+				(i.e. sysfs control of SMT is disabled.)
+
+			flush
+				Leaves SMT enabled and enables the default
+				hypervisor mitigation, i.e. conditional
+				L1D flush.
+
+				SMT control and L1D flush control via the
+				sysfs interface is still possible after
+				boot.  Hypervisors will issue a warning
+				when the first VM is started in a
+				potentially insecure configuration,
+				i.e. SMT enabled or L1D flush disabled.
+
+			flush,nosmt
+
+				Disables SMT and enables the default
+				hypervisor mitigation.
+
+				SMT control and L1D flush control via the
+				sysfs interface is still possible after
+				boot.  Hypervisors will issue a warning
+				when the first VM is started in a
+				potentially insecure configuration,
+				i.e. SMT enabled or L1D flush disabled.
+
+			flush,nowarn
+				Same as 'flush', but hypervisors will not
+				warn when a VM is started in a potentially
+				insecure configuration.
+
+			off
+				Disables hypervisor mitigations and doesn't
+				emit any warnings.
+
+			Default is 'flush'.
+
+			For details see: Documentation/admin-guide/l1tf.rst
+
 	l2cr=		[PPC]
 
 	l3cr=		[PPC]
@@ -2687,6 +2761,10 @@
 	nosmt		[KNL,S390] Disable symmetric multithreading (SMT).
 			Equivalent to smt=1.
 
+			[KNL,x86] Disable symmetric multithreading (SMT).
+			nosmt=force: Force disable SMT, cannot be undone
+				     via the sysfs control file.
+
 	nospectre_v2	[X86] Disable all mitigations for the Spectre variant 2
 			(indirect branch prediction) vulnerability. System may
 			allow data leaks with this option, which is equivalent
diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/l1tf.rst b/Documentation/admin-guide/l1tf.rst
new file mode 100644
index 000000000000..bae52b845de0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/l1tf.rst
@@ -0,0 +1,610 @@
+L1TF - L1 Terminal Fault
+========================
+
+L1 Terminal Fault is a hardware vulnerability which allows unprivileged
+speculative access to data which is available in the Level 1 Data Cache
+when the page table entry controlling the virtual address, which is used
+for the access, has the Present bit cleared or other reserved bits set.
+
+Affected processors
+-------------------
+
+This vulnerability affects a wide range of Intel processors. The
+vulnerability is not present on:
+
+   - Processors from AMD, Centaur and other non Intel vendors
+
+   - Older processor models, where the CPU family is < 6
+
+   - A range of Intel ATOM processors (Cedarview, Cloverview, Lincroft,
+     Penwell, Pineview, Silvermont, Airmont, Merrifield)
+
+   - The Intel XEON PHI family
+
+   - Intel processors which have the ARCH_CAP_RDCL_NO bit set in the
+     IA32_ARCH_CAPABILITIES MSR. If the bit is set the CPU is not affected
+     by the Meltdown vulnerability either. These CPUs should become
+     available by end of 2018.
+
+Whether a processor is affected or not can be read out from the L1TF
+vulnerability file in sysfs. See :ref:`l1tf_sys_info`.
+
+Related CVEs
+------------
+
+The following CVE entries are related to the L1TF vulnerability:
+
+   =============  =================  ==============================
+   CVE-2018-3615  L1 Terminal Fault  SGX related aspects
+   CVE-2018-3620  L1 Terminal Fault  OS, SMM related aspects
+   CVE-2018-3646  L1 Terminal Fault  Virtualization related aspects
+   =============  =================  ==============================
+
+Problem
+-------
+
+If an instruction accesses a virtual address for which the relevant page
+table entry (PTE) has the Present bit cleared or other reserved bits set,
+then speculative execution ignores the invalid PTE and loads the referenced
+data if it is present in the Level 1 Data Cache, as if the page referenced
+by the address bits in the PTE was still present and accessible.
+
+While this is a purely speculative mechanism and the instruction will raise
+a page fault when it is retired eventually, the pure act of loading the
+data and making it available to other speculative instructions opens up the
+opportunity for side channel attacks to unprivileged malicious code,
+similar to the Meltdown attack.
+
+While Meltdown breaks the user space to kernel space protection, L1TF
+allows to attack any physical memory address in the system and the attack
+works across all protection domains. It allows an attack of SGX and also
+works from inside virtual machines because the speculation bypasses the
+extended page table (EPT) protection mechanism.
+
+
+Attack scenarios
+----------------
+
+1. Malicious user space
+^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+
+   Operating Systems store arbitrary information in the address bits of a
+   PTE which is marked non present. This allows a malicious user space
+   application to attack the physical memory to which these PTEs resolve.
+   In some cases user-space can maliciously influence the information
+   encoded in the address bits of the PTE, thus making attacks more
+   deterministic and more practical.
+
+   The Linux kernel contains a mitigation for this attack vector, PTE
+   inversion, which is permanently enabled and has no performance
+   impact. The kernel ensures that the address bits of PTEs, which are not
+   marked present, never point to cacheable physical memory space.
+
+   A system with an up to date kernel is protected against attacks from
+   malicious user space applications.
+
+2. Malicious guest in a virtual machine
+^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+
+   The fact that L1TF breaks all domain protections allows malicious guest
+   OSes, which can control the PTEs directly, and malicious guest user
+   space applications, which run on an unprotected guest kernel lacking the
+   PTE inversion mitigation for L1TF, to attack physical host memory.
+
+   A special aspect of L1TF in the context of virtualization is symmetric
+   multi threading (SMT). The Intel implementation of SMT is called
+   HyperThreading. The fact that Hyperthreads on the affected processors
+   share the L1 Data Cache (L1D) is important for this. As the flaw allows
+   only to attack data which is present in L1D, a malicious guest running
+   on one Hyperthread can attack the data which is brought into the L1D by
+   the context which runs on the sibling Hyperthread of the same physical
+   core. This context can be host OS, host user space or a different guest.
+
+   If the processor does not support Extended Page Tables, the attack is
+   only possible, when the hypervisor does not sanitize the content of the
+   effective (shadow) page tables.
+
+   While solutions exist to mitigate these attack vectors fully, these
+   mitigations are not enabled by default in the Linux kernel because they
+   can affect performance significantly. The kernel provides several
+   mechanisms which can be utilized to address the problem depending on the
+   deployment scenario. The mitigations, their protection scope and impact
+   are described in the next sections.
+
+   The default mitigations and the rationale for choosing them are explained
+   at the end of this document. See :ref:`default_mitigations`.
+
+.. _l1tf_sys_info:
+
+L1TF system information
+-----------------------
+
+The Linux kernel provides a sysfs interface to enumerate the current L1TF
+status of the system: whether the system is vulnerable, and which
+mitigations are active. The relevant sysfs file is:
+
+/sys/devices/system/cpu/vulnerabilities/l1tf
+
+The possible values in this file are:
+
+  ===========================   ===============================
+  'Not affected'		The processor is not vulnerable
+  'Mitigation: PTE Inversion'	The host protection is active
+  ===========================   ===============================
+
+If KVM/VMX is enabled and the processor is vulnerable then the following
+information is appended to the 'Mitigation: PTE Inversion' part:
+
+  - SMT status:
+
+    =====================  ================
+    'VMX: SMT vulnerable'  SMT is enabled
+    'VMX: SMT disabled'    SMT is disabled
+    =====================  ================
+
+  - L1D Flush mode:
+
+    ================================  ====================================
+    'L1D vulnerable'		      L1D flushing is disabled
+
+    'L1D conditional cache flushes'   L1D flush is conditionally enabled
+
+    'L1D cache flushes'		      L1D flush is unconditionally enabled
+    ================================  ====================================
+
+The resulting grade of protection is discussed in the following sections.
+
+
+Host mitigation mechanism
+-------------------------
+
+The kernel is unconditionally protected against L1TF attacks from malicious
+user space running on the host.
+
+
+Guest mitigation mechanisms
+---------------------------
+
+.. _l1d_flush:
+
+1. L1D flush on VMENTER
+^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+
+   To make sure that a guest cannot attack data which is present in the L1D
+   the hypervisor flushes the L1D before entering the guest.
+
+   Flushing the L1D evicts not only the data which should not be accessed
+   by a potentially malicious guest, it also flushes the guest
+   data. Flushing the L1D has a performance impact as the processor has to
+   bring the flushed guest data back into the L1D. Depending on the
+   frequency of VMEXIT/VMENTER and the type of computations in the guest
+   performance degradation in the range of 1% to 50% has been observed. For
+   scenarios where guest VMEXIT/VMENTER are rare the performance impact is
+   minimal. Virtio and mechanisms like posted interrupts are designed to
+   confine the VMEXITs to a bare minimum, but specific configurations and
+   application scenarios might still suffer from a high VMEXIT rate.
+
+   The kernel provides two L1D flush modes:
+    - conditional ('cond')
+    - unconditional ('always')
+
+   The conditional mode avoids L1D flushing after VMEXITs which execute
+   only audited code paths before the corresponding VMENTER. These code
+   paths have been verified that they cannot expose secrets or other
+   interesting data to an attacker, but they can leak information about the
+   address space layout of the hypervisor.
+
+   Unconditional mode flushes L1D on all VMENTER invocations and provides
+   maximum protection. It has a higher overhead than the conditional
+   mode. The overhead cannot be quantified correctly as it depends on the
+   workload scenario and the resulting number of VMEXITs.
+
+   The general recommendation is to enable L1D flush on VMENTER. The kernel
+   defaults to conditional mode on affected processors.
+
+   **Note**, that L1D flush does not prevent the SMT problem because the
+   sibling thread will also bring back its data into the L1D which makes it
+   attackable again.
+
+   L1D flush can be controlled by the administrator via the kernel command
+   line and sysfs control files. See :ref:`mitigation_control_command_line`
+   and :ref:`mitigation_control_kvm`.
+
+.. _guest_confinement:
+
+2. Guest VCPU confinement to dedicated physical cores
+^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+
+   To address the SMT problem, it is possible to make a guest or a group of
+   guests affine to one or more physical cores. The proper mechanism for
+   that is to utilize exclusive cpusets to ensure that no other guest or
+   host tasks can run on these cores.
+
+   If only a single guest or related guests run on sibling SMT threads on
+   the same physical core then they can only attack their own memory and
+   restricted parts of the host memory.
+
+   Host memory is attackable, when one of the sibling SMT threads runs in
+   host OS (hypervisor) context and the other in guest context. The amount
+   of valuable information from the host OS context depends on the context
+   which the host OS executes, i.e. interrupts, soft interrupts and kernel
+   threads. The amount of valuable data from these contexts cannot be
+   declared as non-interesting for an attacker without deep inspection of
+   the code.
+
+   **Note**, that assigning guests to a fixed set of physical cores affects
+   the ability of the scheduler to do load balancing and might have
+   negative effects on CPU utilization depending on the hosting
+   scenario. Disabling SMT might be a viable alternative for particular
+   scenarios.
+
+   For further information about confining guests to a single or to a group
+   of cores consult the cpusets documentation:
+
+   https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/cgroup-v1/cpusets.txt
+
+.. _interrupt_isolation:
+
+3. Interrupt affinity
+^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+
+   Interrupts can be made affine to logical CPUs. This is not universally
+   true because there are types of interrupts which are truly per CPU
+   interrupts, e.g. the local timer interrupt. Aside of that multi queue
+   devices affine their interrupts to single CPUs or groups of CPUs per
+   queue without allowing the administrator to control the affinities.
+
+   Moving the interrupts, which can be affinity controlled, away from CPUs
+   which run untrusted guests, reduces the attack vector space.
+
+   Whether the interrupts with are affine to CPUs, which run untrusted
+   guests, provide interesting data for an attacker depends on the system
+   configuration and the scenarios which run on the system. While for some
+   of the interrupts it can be assumed that they won't expose interesting
+   information beyond exposing hints about the host OS memory layout, there
+   is no way to make general assumptions.
+
+   Interrupt affinity can be controlled by the administrator via the
+   /proc/irq/$NR/smp_affinity[_list] files. Limited documentation is
+   available at:
+
+   https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/IRQ-affinity.txt
+
+.. _smt_control:
+
+4. SMT control
+^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+
+   To prevent the SMT issues of L1TF it might be necessary to disable SMT
+   completely. Disabling SMT can have a significant performance impact, but
+   the impact depends on the hosting scenario and the type of workloads.
+   The impact of disabling SMT needs also to be weighted against the impact
+   of other mitigation solutions like confining guests to dedicated cores.
+
+   The kernel provides a sysfs interface to retrieve the status of SMT and
+   to control it. It also provides a kernel command line interface to
+   control SMT.
+
+   The kernel command line interface consists of the following options:
+
+     =========== ==========================================================
+     nosmt	 Affects the bring up of the secondary CPUs during boot. The
+		 kernel tries to bring all present CPUs online during the
+		 boot process. "nosmt" makes sure that from each physical
+		 core only one - the so called primary (hyper) thread is
+		 activated. Due to a design flaw of Intel processors related
+		 to Machine Check Exceptions the non primary siblings have
+		 to be brought up at least partially and are then shut down
+		 again.  "nosmt" can be undone via the sysfs interface.
+
+     nosmt=force Has the same effect as "nosmt" but it does not allow to
+		 undo the SMT disable via the sysfs interface.
+     =========== ==========================================================
+
+   The sysfs interface provides two files:
+
+   - /sys/devices/system/cpu/smt/control
+   - /sys/devices/system/cpu/smt/active
+
+   /sys/devices/system/cpu/smt/control:
+
+     This file allows to read out the SMT control state and provides the
+     ability to disable or (re)enable SMT. The possible states are:
+
+	==============  ===================================================
+	on		SMT is supported by the CPU and enabled. All
+			logical CPUs can be onlined and offlined without
+			restrictions.
+
+	off		SMT is supported by the CPU and disabled. Only
+			the so called primary SMT threads can be onlined
+			and offlined without restrictions. An attempt to
+			online a non-primary sibling is rejected
+
+	forceoff	Same as 'off' but the state cannot be controlled.
+			Attempts to write to the control file are rejected.
+
+	notsupported	The processor does not support SMT. It's therefore
+			not affected by the SMT implications of L1TF.
+			Attempts to write to the control file are rejected.
+	==============  ===================================================
+
+     The possible states which can be written into this file to control SMT
+     state are:
+
+     - on
+     - off
+     - forceoff
+
+   /sys/devices/system/cpu/smt/active:
+
+     This file reports whether SMT is enabled and active, i.e. if on any
+     physical core two or more sibling threads are online.
+
+   SMT control is also possible at boot time via the l1tf kernel command
+   line parameter in combination with L1D flush control. See
+   :ref:`mitigation_control_command_line`.
+
+5. Disabling EPT
+^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+
+  Disabling EPT for virtual machines provides full mitigation for L1TF even
+  with SMT enabled, because the effective page tables for guests are
+  managed and sanitized by the hypervisor. Though disabling EPT has a
+  significant performance impact especially when the Meltdown mitigation
+  KPTI is enabled.
+
+  EPT can be disabled in the hypervisor via the 'kvm-intel.ept' parameter.
+
+There is ongoing research and development for new mitigation mechanisms to
+address the performance impact of disabling SMT or EPT.
+
+.. _mitigation_control_command_line:
+
+Mitigation control on the kernel command line
+---------------------------------------------
+
+The kernel command line allows to control the L1TF mitigations at boot
+time with the option "l1tf=". The valid arguments for this option are:
+
+  ============  =============================================================
+  full		Provides all available mitigations for the L1TF
+		vulnerability. Disables SMT and enables all mitigations in
+		the hypervisors, i.e. unconditional L1D flushing
+
+		SMT control and L1D flush control via the sysfs interface
+		is still possible after boot.  Hypervisors will issue a
+		warning when the first VM is started in a potentially
+		insecure configuration, i.e. SMT enabled or L1D flush
+		disabled.
+
+  full,force	Same as 'full', but disables SMT and L1D flush runtime
+		control. Implies the 'nosmt=force' command line option.
+		(i.e. sysfs control of SMT is disabled.)
+
+  flush		Leaves SMT enabled and enables the default hypervisor
+		mitigation, i.e. conditional L1D flushing
+
+		SMT control and L1D flush control via the sysfs interface
+		is still possible after boot.  Hypervisors will issue a
+		warning when the first VM is started in a potentially
+		insecure configuration, i.e. SMT enabled or L1D flush
+		disabled.
+
+  flush,nosmt	Disables SMT and enables the default hypervisor mitigation,
+		i.e. conditional L1D flushing.
+
+		SMT control and L1D flush control via the sysfs interface
+		is still possible after boot.  Hypervisors will issue a
+		warning when the first VM is started in a potentially
+		insecure configuration, i.e. SMT enabled or L1D flush
+		disabled.
+
+  flush,nowarn	Same as 'flush', but hypervisors will not warn when a VM is
+		started in a potentially insecure configuration.
+
+  off		Disables hypervisor mitigations and doesn't emit any
+		warnings.
+  ============  =============================================================
+
+The default is 'flush'. For details about L1D flushing see :ref:`l1d_flush`.
+
+
+.. _mitigation_control_kvm:
+
+Mitigation control for KVM - module parameter
+-------------------------------------------------------------
+
+The KVM hypervisor mitigation mechanism, flushing the L1D cache when
+entering a guest, can be controlled with a module parameter.
+
+The option/parameter is "kvm-intel.vmentry_l1d_flush=". It takes the
+following arguments:
+
+  ============  ==============================================================
+  always	L1D cache flush on every VMENTER.
+
+  cond		Flush L1D on VMENTER only when the code between VMEXIT and
+		VMENTER can leak host memory which is considered
+		interesting for an attacker. This still can leak host memory
+		which allows e.g. to determine the hosts address space layout.
+
+  never		Disables the mitigation
+  ============  ==============================================================
+
+The parameter can be provided on the kernel command line, as a module
+parameter when loading the modules and at runtime modified via the sysfs
+file:
+
+/sys/module/kvm_intel/parameters/vmentry_l1d_flush
+
+The default is 'cond'. If 'l1tf=full,force' is given on the kernel command
+line, then 'always' is enforced and the kvm-intel.vmentry_l1d_flush
+module parameter is ignored and writes to the sysfs file are rejected.
+
+
+Mitigation selection guide
+--------------------------
+
+1. No virtualization in use
+^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+
+   The system is protected by the kernel unconditionally and no further
+   action is required.
+
+2. Virtualization with trusted guests
+^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+
+   If the guest comes from a trusted source and the guest OS kernel is
+   guaranteed to have the L1TF mitigations in place the system is fully
+   protected against L1TF and no further action is required.
+
+   To avoid the overhead of the default L1D flushing on VMENTER the
+   administrator can disable the flushing via the kernel command line and
+   sysfs control files. See :ref:`mitigation_control_command_line` and
+   :ref:`mitigation_control_kvm`.
+
+
+3. Virtualization with untrusted guests
+^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+
+3.1. SMT not supported or disabled
+""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
+
+  If SMT is not supported by the processor or disabled in the BIOS or by
+  the kernel, it's only required to enforce L1D flushing on VMENTER.
+
+  Conditional L1D flushing is the default behaviour and can be tuned. See
+  :ref:`mitigation_control_command_line` and :ref:`mitigation_control_kvm`.
+
+3.2. EPT not supported or disabled
+""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
+
+  If EPT is not supported by the processor or disabled in the hypervisor,
+  the system is fully protected. SMT can stay enabled and L1D flushing on
+  VMENTER is not required.
+
+  EPT can be disabled in the hypervisor via the 'kvm-intel.ept' parameter.
+
+3.3. SMT and EPT supported and active
+"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
+
+  If SMT and EPT are supported and active then various degrees of
+  mitigations can be employed:
+
+  - L1D flushing on VMENTER:
+
+    L1D flushing on VMENTER is the minimal protection requirement, but it
+    is only potent in combination with other mitigation methods.
+
+    Conditional L1D flushing is the default behaviour and can be tuned. See
+    :ref:`mitigation_control_command_line` and :ref:`mitigation_control_kvm`.
+
+  - Guest confinement:
+
+    Confinement of guests to a single or a group of physical cores which
+    are not running any other processes, can reduce the attack surface
+    significantly, but interrupts, soft interrupts and kernel threads can
+    still expose valuable data to a potential attacker. See
+    :ref:`guest_confinement`.
+
+  - Interrupt isolation:
+
+    Isolating the guest CPUs from interrupts can reduce the attack surface
+    further, but still allows a malicious guest to explore a limited amount
+    of host physical memory. This can at least be used to gain knowledge
+    about the host address space layout. The interrupts which have a fixed
+    affinity to the CPUs which run the untrusted guests can depending on
+    the scenario still trigger soft interrupts and schedule kernel threads
+    which might expose valuable information. See
+    :ref:`interrupt_isolation`.
+
+The above three mitigation methods combined can provide protection to a
+certain degree, but the risk of the remaining attack surface has to be
+carefully analyzed. For full protection the following methods are
+available:
+
+  - Disabling SMT:
+
+    Disabling SMT and enforcing the L1D flushing provides the maximum
+    amount of protection. This mitigation is not depending on any of the
+    above mitigation methods.
+
+    SMT control and L1D flushing can be tuned by the command line
+    parameters 'nosmt', 'l1tf', 'kvm-intel.vmentry_l1d_flush' and at run
+    time with the matching sysfs control files. See :ref:`smt_control`,
+    :ref:`mitigation_control_command_line` and
+    :ref:`mitigation_control_kvm`.
+
+  - Disabling EPT:
+
+    Disabling EPT provides the maximum amount of protection as well. It is
+    not depending on any of the above mitigation methods. SMT can stay
+    enabled and L1D flushing is not required, but the performance impact is
+    significant.
+
+    EPT can be disabled in the hypervisor via the 'kvm-intel.ept'
+    parameter.
+
+3.4. Nested virtual machines
+""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
+
+When nested virtualization is in use, three operating systems are involved:
+the bare metal hypervisor, the nested hypervisor and the nested virtual
+machine.  VMENTER operations from the nested hypervisor into the nested
+guest will always be processed by the bare metal hypervisor. If KVM is the
+bare metal hypervisor it wiil:
+
+ - Flush the L1D cache on every switch from the nested hypervisor to the
+   nested virtual machine, so that the nested hypervisor's secrets are not
+   exposed to the nested virtual machine;
+
+ - Flush the L1D cache on every switch from the nested virtual machine to
+   the nested hypervisor; this is a complex operation, and flushing the L1D
+   cache avoids that the bare metal hypervisor's secrets are exposed to the
+   nested virtual machine;
+
+ - Instruct the nested hypervisor to not perform any L1D cache flush. This
+   is an optimization to avoid double L1D flushing.
+
+
+.. _default_mitigations:
+
+Default mitigations
+-------------------
+
+  The kernel default mitigations for vulnerable processors are:
+
+  - PTE inversion to protect against malicious user space. This is done
+    unconditionally and cannot be controlled.
+
+  - L1D conditional flushing on VMENTER when EPT is enabled for
+    a guest.
+
+  The kernel does not by default enforce the disabling of SMT, which leaves
+  SMT systems vulnerable when running untrusted guests with EPT enabled.
+
+  The rationale for this choice is:
+
+  - Force disabling SMT can break existing setups, especially with
+    unattended updates.
+
+  - If regular users run untrusted guests on their machine, then L1TF is
+    just an add on to other malware which might be embedded in an untrusted
+    guest, e.g. spam-bots or attacks on the local network.
+
+    There is no technical way to prevent a user from running untrusted code
+    on their machines blindly.
+
+  - It's technically extremely unlikely and from today's knowledge even
+    impossible that L1TF can be exploited via the most popular attack
+    mechanisms like JavaScript because these mechanisms have no way to
+    control PTEs. If this would be possible and not other mitigation would
+    be possible, then the default might be different.
+
+  - The administrators of cloud and hosting setups have to carefully
+    analyze the risk for their scenarios and make the appropriate
+    mitigation choices, which might even vary across their deployed
+    machines and also result in other changes of their overall setup.
+    There is no way for the kernel to provide a sensible default for this
+    kind of scenarios.