Intel Corporation

Scott J Cape

Robert S Chappell

Scott P Bobholz

Jason W Brandt

Joseph Nuzman

Lihu Rappoport

Sergiu D Ghetie

Deepak K Gupta

Jared Warner Stark, Iv

Rodrigo Branco

Wojciech S Powiertowski

Sagar V Dalvi

Ariel Sabba

Yair Berger

Gilad Holzstein

Glenn J Hinton

Martin Guy Dixon

Raj K Ramanujan

David Zimmerman

Vasudevan Srinivasan

Rajesh S Parthasarathy

Hisham Shafi

Muthukumar Swaminathan

Adrian C Moga

Wayne Alan Downer

Madhavan Parthasarathy

Larry O Smith

David T Mayo

Chinmay Ashok

Yogesh Bijlani

Vinila Rose

Atanas K Iwanow

Lorie Wigle

Jason Kennedy

Wayne A Downer

Methods and apparatuses relating to mitigations for speculative execution side channels are described. Speculative execution hardware and environments that utilize the mitigations are also described. For example, three indirect branch control mechanisms and their associated hardware are discussed herein: (i) indirect branch restricted speculation (IBRS) to restrict speculation of indirect branches, (ii) single thread indirect branch predictors (STIBP) to prevent indirect branch predictions from being controlled by a sibling thread, and (iii) indirect branch predictor barrier (IBPB) to prevent indirect branch predictions after the barrier from being controlled by software executed before the barrier.

Apparatuses and methods for speculative execution side channel mitigation

Methods and apparatus for restricted deployment of targeted processor firmware updates. During a patch enabling per-work flow, service entitlement license information comprising one of more service entitlements is generated and provisioned on one or more computing platforms. A restricted deployment microcode (uCode) update release (aka uCode patch) targeted for platforms having CPUs and/or XPUs with certain part identifier is sent to the one or more platforms. Run-time software and/or firmware on the platforms are executed to access the provisioned service entitlement license information, which is used to authentic and verify the restricted deployment uCode update release using a service entitlement having a part identifier associated with the platform's CPU. In one solution, authentication is performed using a hash-matching scheme and verification is used to verify the platform is properly licensed to load uCode included in the restricted deployment microcode (uCode) update release into the CPU.

Techniques for restricted deployment of targeted processor firmware updates

In one embodiment the apparatus is a micro-page table engine that includes logic that is capable of receiving a memory page request for a page in global memory address space. The apparatus also includes a translation lookaside buffer (TLB) that is capable of storing one or more memory page address translations. Additionally, the apparatus also has a page miss handler capable of performing a micro physical address lookup in a page miss handler tag table in response to the TLB not storing the memory page address translation for the page of memory referenced by the memory page request. The apparatus also includes memory management logic that is capable of managing the page miss handler tag table entries.

Apparatus, method, and system for implementing micro page tables

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Portland, OR, United States of America

Scott J Cape