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Date: Tue, 3 Jul 2018 20:16:19 +0200
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: Vasily Averin <vvs@...tuozzo.com>
Cc: owl-dev@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: 32-bit syscall breakage in -431 kernel with KAISER

On Tue, Jul 03, 2018 at 08:32:57PM +0300, Vasily Averin wrote:
> However then node was crashed on start of microcode_ctl service on host. 
> 
> I've found that on our kernel __cpuinit moves get_scattered_cpuid_extra() into init section,
> but this function can be called lagally called after initialization,
> from microcode_write() -> spec_ctrl_rescan_cpuid()
> 
> Issue was caused by CONFIG_HOTPLUG_CPU enabled on Red Hat but disabled on our kernels.
> Therefore I afraid your kernel should be affected too.
> 
> Could you please clarify this question?

It's quite possible we never tested microcode_ctl on Owl.  It isn't part
of Owl, even though there was intent to add it at some point.

I enabled CONFIG_MICROCODE=m in our kernels in late 2016:

* Sat Dec 10 2016 Solar Designer <solar-at-owl.openwall.com> 2.6.18-408.el5.028stab120.1.owl5
- Merged in Red Hat's CVE-2016-5195 "Dirty COW" fix from -416 (slightly
different from the fix included in OpenVZ's 120.3 released earlier) while also
keeping the mitigation introduced in owl4.
- In the x86_64 config, enabled CONFIG_MICROCODE=m, CONFIG_NUMA=y and many
related options, CONFIG_HUGETLB_PAGE=y, CONFIG_HUGETLBFS=y, CONFIG_I2C=m and
many sensors (similar to RHEL's), bumped up CONFIG_NR_CPUS from 32 to 255.
Tested many of these on a Dell PowerEdge R720xd with 2x E5-2660 v2 (NUMA, huge
pages, some I2C sensors, 40 logical CPUs).

IIRC, I intended to test it on that Dell machine mentioned in there, but
it was already at Intel's latest microcode revision for its CPUs, so I
did not.  I think I did test loading of the kernel module, though.

Alexander

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