Linux 5.7 To Bring Mitigation For Intel Gen7 Ivybridge/Haswell "iGPU Leak"

Back in January "iGPU Leak" was disclosed as CVE-2019-14615 as an information leakage vulnerability affecting Intel's graphics architecture leading to both register and local memory leaks. While Intel "Gen9" graphics were patched right away on the disclosure date and Gen8 Broadwell graphics were already mitigated, Gen7/Gen7.5 graphics took longer... In fact, not until the Linux 5.7 release this spring is there the mitigation for iGPU Leak.

On the January disclosure date the Intel open-source developers did post Gen7/Gen7.5 patches for Ivybridge/Haswell that killed the graphics performance. Given the hefty performance hits, the patches weren't merged to mainline.

But with further optimizations to these Gen7 era iGPU Leak patches, Intel was able to take care of the performance hit.

So now that iGPU Leak can be mitigated for these older CPUs without crippling the graphics performance, the security fix is forthcoming. As part of the Intel DRM-Next patches sent out on Friday is the Gen7 work to clear all EU/L3 residual contexts for mitigating this vulnerability. Therefore with Linux 5.7 the mitigation is in order and without hurting the graphics capabilities for these aging Intel processors.

The Gen7 iGPU Leak addressing is in the same pull request as effectively declaring Intel Tiger Lake "Gen12" graphics as stable. Fresh benchmarks forthcoming.