Hi! On kCFI (CONFIG_CFI_CLANG=y) builds all indirect calls should have the CFI check on (with very few exceptions). Not having the CFI checks undermines the protection provided by CFI and will make these sites candidates for people wanting to steal your cookies. Specifically the ABI changes are so that doing indirect calls without the CFI magic, to a CFI adorned function is not compatible (although it happens to work for some setups, it very much does not for FineIBT). Rust people tripped over this the other day, since their 'core' happened to have some no_sanitize(kcfi) bits in, which promptly exploded when ran with FineIBT on. Since this is very much not a supported model -- on purpose, have objtool detect and warn about such constructs. This effort [1] found all existing [2] non-cfi indirect calls in the kernel. Notably the KVM fastop emulation stuff -- which is completely rewritten -- the generated code doesn't look horrific, but is slightly more verbose. I'm running on the assumption that instruction emulation is not super performance critical these days of zero VM-exit VMs etc. Paolo noted that pre-Westmere (2010) cares about this. KVM has another; the VMX interrupt injection stuff calls the IDT handler directly. This is rewritten to to use the FRED dispatch table, which moves it all into C. HyperV hypercall page stuff, which I've previously suggested use direct calls, and which I've now converted (after getting properly annoyed with that code). Also available at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/peterz/queue.git x86/core Changes since v2: - renamed COP to EM_ASM - reworked the KVM-IDT stuff (Sean, Josh) [1] https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20250410154556.GB9003@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [2] https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20250410194334.GA3248459@xxxxxxxxxx
