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authorDave Hansen <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com>2015-12-14 11:06:34 -0800
committerIngo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>2016-03-29 11:21:17 +0200
commit591b1d8d86074ac3a3163d89bcfe7b232cf83902 (patch)
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x86/mm/pkeys: Add missing Documentation
Stefan Richter noticed that the X86_INTEL_MEMORY_PROTECTION_KEYS option in arch/x86/Kconfig references Documentation/x86/protection-keys.txt, but the file does not exist. This is a patch merging mishap: the final (v8) version of the pkeys series did not include the documentation patch 32 and v7 included. Add it now. Reported-by: Stefan Richter <stefanr@s5r6.in-berlin.de> Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com> Cc: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net> Cc: Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de> Cc: Brian Gerst <brgerst@gmail.com> Cc: Dave Hansen <dave@sr71.net> Cc: Denys Vlasenko <dvlasenk@redhat.com> Cc: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com> Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> Cc: linux-mm@kvack.org Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20151214190634.426BEE41@viggo.jf.intel.com [ Added changelog. ] Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/x86')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/x86/protection-keys.txt27
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diff --git a/Documentation/x86/protection-keys.txt b/Documentation/x86/protection-keys.txt
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+Memory Protection Keys for Userspace (PKU aka PKEYs) is a CPU feature
+which will be found on future Intel CPUs.
+
+Memory Protection Keys provides a mechanism for enforcing page-based
+protections, but without requiring modification of the page tables
+when an application changes protection domains. It works by
+dedicating 4 previously ignored bits in each page table entry to a
+"protection key", giving 16 possible keys.
+
+There is also a new user-accessible register (PKRU) with two separate
+bits (Access Disable and Write Disable) for each key. Being a CPU
+register, PKRU is inherently thread-local, potentially giving each
+thread a different set of protections from every other thread.
+
+There are two new instructions (RDPKRU/WRPKRU) for reading and writing
+to the new register. The feature is only available in 64-bit mode,
+even though there is theoretically space in the PAE PTEs. These
+permissions are enforced on data access only and have no effect on
+instruction fetches.
+
+=========================== Config Option ===========================
+
+This config option adds approximately 1.5kb of text. and 50 bytes of
+data to the executable. A workload which does large O_DIRECT reads
+of holes in XFS files was run to exercise get_user_pages_fast(). No
+performance delta was observed with the config option
+enabled or disabled.