linux.git/Documentation/admin-guide, branch v5.10.247

fs: Add 'initramfs_options' to set initramfs mount options

2025-10-29T13:01:14+00:00

[ Upstream commit 278033a225e13ec21900f0a92b8351658f5377f2 ]

When CONFIG_TMPFS is enabled, the initial root filesystem is a tmpfs.
By default, a tmpfs mount is limited to using 50% of the available RAM
for its content. This can be problematic in memory-constrained
environments, particularly during a kdump capture.

In a kdump scenario, the capture kernel boots with a limited amount of
memory specified by the 'crashkernel' parameter. If the initramfs is
large, it may fail to unpack into the tmpfs rootfs due to insufficient
space. This is because to get X MB of usable space in tmpfs, 2*X MB of
memory must be available for the mount. This leads to an OOM failure
during the early boot process, preventing a successful crash dump.

This patch introduces a new kernel command-line parameter,
initramfs_options, which allows passing specific mount options directly
to the rootfs when it is first mounted. This gives users control over
the rootfs behavior.

For example, a user can now specify initramfs_options=size=75% to allow
the tmpfs to use up to 75% of the available memory. This can
significantly reduce the memory pressure for kdump.

Consider a practical example:

To unpack a 48MB initramfs, the tmpfs needs 48MB of usable space. With
the default 50% limit, this requires a memory pool of 96MB to be
available for the tmpfs mount. The total memory requirement is therefore
approximately: 16MB (vmlinuz) + 48MB (loaded initramfs) + 48MB (unpacked
kernel) + 96MB (for tmpfs) + 12MB (runtime overhead) ≈ 220MB.

By using initramfs_options=size=75%, the memory pool required for the
48MB tmpfs is reduced to 48MB / 0.75 = 64MB. This reduces the total
memory requirement by 32MB (96MB - 64MB), allowing the kdump to succeed
with a smaller crashkernel size, such as 192MB.

An alternative approach of reusing the existing rootflags parameter was
considered. However, a new, dedicated initramfs_options parameter was
chosen to avoid altering the current behavior of rootflags (which
applies to the final root filesystem) and to prevent any potential
regressions.

Also add documentation for the new kernel parameter "initramfs_options"

This approach is inspired by prior discussions and patches on the topic.
Ref: https://www.lightofdawn.org/blog/?viewDetailed=00128
Ref: https://landley.net/notes-2015.html#01-01-2015
Ref: https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/6/29/783
Ref: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/filesystems/ramfs-rootfs-initramfs.html#what-is-rootfs

Signed-off-by: Lichen Liu
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/20250815121459.3391223-1-lichliu@redhat.com
Tested-by: Rob Landley
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner
Signed-off-by: Sasha Levin

x86/vmscape: Enable the mitigation

2025-09-11T15:16:06+00:00

commit 556c1ad666ad90c50ec8fccb930dd5046cfbecfb upstream.

Enable the previously added mitigation for VMscape. Add the cmdline
vmscape={off|ibpb|force} and sysfs reporting.

Signed-off-by: Pawan Gupta 
Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen 
Reviewed-by: Borislav Petkov (AMD) 
Reviewed-by: Dave Hansen 
Signed-off-by: Amit Shah 
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman

Documentation/hw-vuln: Add VMSCAPE documentation

2025-09-11T15:16:06+00:00

commit 9969779d0803f5dcd4460ae7aca2bc3fd91bff12 upstream.

VMSCAPE is a vulnerability that may allow a guest to influence the branch
prediction in host userspace, particularly affecting hypervisors like QEMU.

Add the documentation.

Signed-off-by: Pawan Gupta 
Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen 
Reviewed-by: Borislav Petkov (AMD) 
Reviewed-by: Dave Hansen 
Signed-off-by: Amit Shah 
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman

x86/bugs: Add a Transient Scheduler Attacks mitigation

2025-07-17T16:28:00+00:00

From: "Borislav Petkov (AMD)" 

Commit d8010d4ba43e9f790925375a7de100604a5e2dba upstream.

Add the required features detection glue to bugs.c et all in order to
support the TSA mitigation.

Co-developed-by: Kim Phillips 
Signed-off-by: Kim Phillips 
Signed-off-by: Borislav Petkov (AMD) 
Reviewed-by: Pawan Gupta 
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman

x86/bugs: Rename MDS machinery to something more generic

2025-07-17T16:28:00+00:00

From: "Borislav Petkov (AMD)" 

Commit f9af88a3d384c8b55beb5dc5483e5da0135fadbd upstream.

It will be used by other x86 mitigations.

No functional changes.

Signed-off-by: Borislav Petkov (AMD) 
Reviewed-by: Pawan Gupta 
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman

x86/its: Add "vmexit" option to skip mitigation on some CPUs

2025-07-17T16:27:56+00:00

commit 2665281a07e19550944e8354a2024635a7b2714a upstream.

Ice Lake generation CPUs are not affected by guest/host isolation part of
ITS. If a user is only concerned about KVM guests, they can now choose a
new cmdline option "vmexit" that will not deploy the ITS mitigation when
CPU is not affected by guest/host isolation. This saves the performance
overhead of ITS mitigation on Ice Lake gen CPUs.

When "vmexit" option selected, if the CPU is affected by ITS guest/host
isolation, the default ITS mitigation is deployed.

Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen 
Reviewed-by: Josh Poimboeuf 
Reviewed-by: Alexandre Chartre 
Signed-off-by: Pawan Gupta 
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman

x86/its: Enable Indirect Target Selection mitigation

2025-07-17T16:27:55+00:00

commit f4818881c47fd91fcb6d62373c57c7844e3de1c0 upstream.

Indirect Target Selection (ITS) is a bug in some pre-ADL Intel CPUs with
eIBRS. It affects prediction of indirect branch and RETs in the
lower half of cacheline. Due to ITS such branches may get wrongly predicted
to a target of (direct or indirect) branch that is located in the upper
half of the cacheline.

Scope of impact
===============

Guest/host isolation
--------------------
When eIBRS is used for guest/host isolation, the indirect branches in the
VMM may still be predicted with targets corresponding to branches in the
guest.

Intra-mode
----------
cBPF or other native gadgets can be used for intra-mode training and
disclosure using ITS.

User/kernel isolation
---------------------
When eIBRS is enabled user/kernel isolation is not impacted.

Indirect Branch Prediction Barrier (IBPB)
-----------------------------------------
After an IBPB, indirect branches may be predicted with targets
corresponding to direct branches which were executed prior to IBPB. This is
mitigated by a microcode update.

Add cmdline parameter indirect_target_selection=off|on|force to control the
mitigation to relocate the affected branches to an ITS-safe thunk i.e.
located in the upper half of cacheline. Also add the sysfs reporting.

When retpoline mitigation is deployed, ITS safe-thunks are not needed,
because retpoline sequence is already ITS-safe. Similarly, when call depth
tracking (CDT) mitigation is deployed (retbleed=stuff), ITS safe return
thunk is not used, as CDT prevents RSB-underflow.

To not overcomplicate things, ITS mitigation is not supported with
spectre-v2 lfence;jmp mitigation. Moreover, it is less practical to deploy
lfence;jmp mitigation on ITS affected parts anyways.

Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen 
Reviewed-by: Josh Poimboeuf 
Reviewed-by: Alexandre Chartre 
Signed-off-by: Pawan Gupta 
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman

Documentation: x86/bugs/its: Add ITS documentation

2025-07-17T16:27:54+00:00

commit 1ac116ce6468670eeda39345a5585df308243dca upstream.

Add the admin-guide for Indirect Target Selection (ITS).

Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen 
Reviewed-by: Josh Poimboeuf 
Reviewed-by: Alexandre Chartre 
Signed-off-by: Pawan Gupta 
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman

arm64: spectre: increase parameters that can be used to turn off bhb mitigation individually

2025-06-27T10:04:23+00:00

[ Upstream commit 877ace9eab7de032f954533afd5d1ecd0cf62eaf ]

In our environment, it was found that the mitigation BHB has a great
impact on the benchmark performance. For example, in the lmbench test,
the "process fork && exit" test performance drops by 20%.
So it is necessary to have the ability to turn off the mitigation
individually through cmdline, thus avoiding having to compile the
kernel by adjusting the config.

Signed-off-by: Liu Song 
Acked-by: Catalin Marinas 
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/1661514050-22263-1-git-send-email-liusong@linux.alibaba.com
Signed-off-by: Catalin Marinas 
Signed-off-by: Pu Lehui 
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman

Revert "x86/bugs: Make spectre user default depend on MITIGATION_SPECTRE_V2" on v6.6 and older

2025-06-27T10:04:20+00:00

This reverts commit 0aa2553778b7531c70de77d729a38aea77626544 which is
commit 98fdaeb296f51ef08e727a7cc72e5b5c864c4f4d upstream.

commit 7adb96687ce8 ("x86/bugs: Make spectre user default depend on
MITIGATION_SPECTRE_V2") depends on commit 72c70f480a70 ("x86/bugs: Add
a separate config for Spectre V2"), which introduced
MITIGATION_SPECTRE_V2.

commit 72c70f480a70 ("x86/bugs: Add a separate config for Spectre V2")
never landed in stable tree, thus, stable tree doesn't have
MITIGATION_SPECTRE_V2, that said, commit 7adb96687ce8 ("x86/bugs: Make
spectre user default depend on MITIGATION_SPECTRE_V2") has no value if
the dependecy was not applied.

Revert commit 7adb96687ce8 ("x86/bugs: Make spectre user default
depend on MITIGATION_SPECTRE_V2")  in stable kernel which landed in in
5.4.294, 5.10.238, 5.15.185, 6.1.141 and 6.6.93 stable versions.

Cc: David.Kaplan@amd.com
Cc: peterz@infradead.org
Cc: pawan.kumar.gupta@linux.intel.com
Cc: mingo@kernel.org
Cc: brad.spengler@opensrcsec.com
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org # 6.6 6.1 5.15 5.10 5.4
Reported-by: Brad Spengler 
Reported-by: Salvatore Bonaccorso 
Signed-off-by: Breno Leitao 
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman