Issuing an IBPB command flushes the Branch Target Buffer, so that any poison
left by one vcpu won't remain when beginning to execute the next.
The cost of IBPB is substantial, and skipped on transition to idle, as Xen's
idle code is robust already. All transitions into vcpu context are fully
serialising in practice (and under consideration for being retroactively
declared architecturally serialising), so a cunning attacker cannot use SP1 to
try and skip the flush.
Signed-off-by: Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@citrix.com>
Reviewed-by: Jan Beulich <jbeulich@suse.com>
master commit: a2ed643ed7
master date: 2018-01-26 14:10:21 +0000
Andrew Cooper
8994cf3cf7