Re: [PATCH v2 4/8] x86/spec_ctrl: Add sysctl knobs to enable/disable SPEC_CTRL feature

From: Peter Zijlstra
Date: Mon Jan 08 2018 - 12:42:35 EST


On Mon, Jan 08, 2018 at 09:28:12AM -0800, Tim Chen wrote:
> On 01/08/2018 08:14 AM, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > On Mon, Jan 08, 2018 at 01:47:07PM +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> >>> a good suggestion, but we encountered some issues with it either
> >>> crashing the kernel at boot or not properly turning on/off.
> >
> > The below boots, but I lack stuff to test the enabling.
>
> Peter,
>
> Thanks. Will give it a spin. One other concern is if
> JUMP_LABEL is not configured, this may not work, and
> we may still need fall back to a control variable.

Urgh yes.. I always forget about that case. Will the retpoline crud be
backported to a GCC old enough to not have asm-goto? If not, we could
make all of this simply require asm-goto.