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Kernel: Restricted DMA and AMD Work in Linux 5.11

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Linux

  • Restricted DMA

    A key component of system hardening is restricting access to memory; this extends to preventing the kernel itself from accessing or modifying much of the memory in the system most of the time. Memory that cannot be accessed cannot be read or changed by an attacker. On many systems, though, these restrictions do not apply to peripheral devices, which can happily use direct memory access (DMA) on most or all of the available memory. The recently posted restricted DMA patch set aims to reduce exposure to buggy or malicious device activity by tightening up control over the memory that DMA operations are allowed to access.
    DMA allows devices to directly read from or write to memory in the system; it is needed to get reasonable I/O performance from anything but the slowest devices. Normally, the kernel is in charge of DMA operations; device drivers allocate buffers and instruct devices to perform I/O on those buffers, and everything works as expected. If the driver or the hardware contains bugs, though, the potential exists for DMA transfers to overwrite unrelated memory, leading to corrupted systems and unhappy users. Malicious (or compromised) hardware can use DMA to compromise the system the hardware is attached to, making users unhappier still; examples of this type of attack have been posted over the years.

    One way to address this problem is to place an I/O memory-management unit (IOMMU) between devices and memory. The kernel programs the IOMMU to allow access to a specific region of memory; the IOMMU then keeps devices from straying outside of that region. Not all systems are equipped with an IOMMU, though; they are mostly limited to the larger processors found in desktop machines, data centers, and the like. Mobile systems usually lack an IOMMU.

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  • A Fix Has Been Proposed For The Slower AMD Performance On Linux 5.11

    With the in-development Linux 5.11 kernel there are many great features and improvements especially for AMD users with some new drivers and other pleasant enhancements. But as I outlined back on Christmas day: Linux 5.11 Is Regressing Hard For AMD Performance With Schedutil. Fortunately, a fix is now en route to the Linux 5.11 kernel for fixing that performance regression affecting AMD Zen 2/3 desktops and servers. 

    As outlined in that original article after bisecting the sizable performance regressions and in follow-up tests, AMD hardware performing slower on Linux 5.11 came down to the CPU frequency invariance support introduced this cycle and is utilized by the "Schedutil" CPU frequency scaling governor. With Schedutil often being the default for AMD systems on newer versions of the Linux kernel, this regression on Linux 5.11 compared to prior kernel releases has been unfortunate. 

  • Linux 5.11 Is Now Looking Great For AMD Zen 2 / Zen 3 Performance - Phoronix

    Not only is the AMD "CPU frequency invariance regression" from that new support with the in-development Linux 5.11 kernel on course to address the performance shortcomings I outlined last month, but with the patched kernel for a number of workloads the performance is now ahead of where it was at with Linux 5.10.

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