published October 18, 2026
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
KVM: SVM: Preserve TLB control (i.e. pending TLB flush) on failed VMRUN
Don't reset the VMCB's TLB control back to "do nothing" on a failed VMRUN,
as empirical testing shows that the CPU performs the requested TLB flush if
and only if VMRUN is successful, i.e. clearing TLB control on a failed
VMRUN effectively drops a TLB flush.
Explicitly track the need to flush all ASIDs on a per-CPU basis, as the
ASID reuse condition is tied to the pCPU, not to the vCPU. As a bonus,
this also obviates the need to avoid clobbering FLUSH_ALL_ASID with
TLB_CONTROL_FLUSH_ASID, e.g. in svm_flush_tlb_asid().
Deliberately don't bother saving/restoring the "old" tlb_ctl on failure,
in quotes because it's not exactly the old tlb_ctl, it's the tlb_ctl from
after pre_svm_run(), but before updating tlb_ctl for flush_all_asids. If
VMRUN fails and TLB_CONTROL_FLUSH_ALL_ASID is forced, then the next
successful run of the VMCB *may* unnecessarily flush all ASIDs, which
strictly speaking could result in noisy neighbor issues. However, the
fact that new_asid() is already guest-triggerable, because of KVM's flawed
behavior of clearing the ASID on emulated INIT, means that a guest can
already trigger a flush of all ASIDs at roughly the same rate. And once
KVM stops clobbering the ASID on emulated INIT, *or* assigns a static ASID
to each vCPU, this flaw goes away.