* H. J. Lu: > This set of patches for GCC 8 mitigates variant #2 of the > speculative execution vulnerabilities on x86 processors identified > by CVE-2017-5715, aka Spectre. They convert indirect branches to > call and return thunks to avoid speculative execution via indirect > call and jmp.
Would it make sense to add a mode which relies on an empty return stack cache? Or will CPUs use the regular branch predictor if the return stack is empty? With an empty return stack cache and no branch predictor, a simple PUSH/RET sequence cannot be predicted, so the complex CALL sequence with a speculation barrier is not needed.
