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Introducing __builtin_speculation_safe_value
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Authored by kristof.beyls on Jul 9 2018, 4:49 AM.
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Summary

This is part of implementing a technique to mitigate against Spectre v1,
similar in spirit to what has been proposed by Chandler for X86_64 at
http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2018-March/122085.html.

This patch adds a new builtin function that provides a mechanism for
limiting the effects of miss-speculation by a CPU.
This patch provides the clang-side of the needed functionality; there is
also an llvm-side patch this patch is dependent on.

We've tried to design this in such a way that it can be used for any
target where this might be necessary. The patch provides a generic
implementation of the builtin, with most of the target-specific
support in the LLVM counter part to this clang patch.

The signature of the new, polymorphic, builtin is:

T __builtin_speculation_safe_value(T v)

T can be any integral type (signed or unsigned char, int, short, long,
etc) or any pointer type.

The builtin assures that value v will be made 0 on execution paths that
are being executed under control flow miss-speculation by the CPU, when
the miss-speculated path originated due to misprediction of a direct
conditional branch.

Whereas this still leaves open the possibility of execution on a
miss-speculated path starting at misprediction of other control flow
instructions, our believe is that the above guarantee is still useful in
mitigating vulnerability to Spectre v1-style attacks and implementable
for most, if not all, target instruction sets.

This also introduces the predefined pre-processor macro
__HAVE_SPECULATION_SAFE_VALUE, that allows users to check if their
version of the compiler supports this intrinsic.

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