On 12 Dec 2015, at 8:56 , Brian Mastenbrook <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> While pulling up the Haskell model to respond to the previous question, I 
> noted the following statement: "The idle thread's code is at an arbitrary 
> location in kernel memory. For convenience in the Haskell model, we place it 
> in the globals frame, but there is no need for it to be in user-accessible 
> memory."
>
> Given that the globals frame is mapped cacheable, doesn't this lead to a 
> potential timing side channel? Tasks would be able to determine whether the 
> idle thread's code has been evicted from cache, which may or may not reveal 
> something interesting about the state of the system as a whole.

Quite possible, but not the only potential timing channel in the present 
kernel. We’re working on a systematic approach to getting rid of them

Gernot


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