Currently, -fcf-protection defaults to both shadow stack and indirect branch tracking (IBT) on x86_64-linux-gnu, and -fhardened follows that. I think it should only enable shadow stack at this point.
I'm not sure if this is a good idea because there will likely be no userspace support for IBT when GCC 14 releases, so these binaries will not be tested. They will carry markup that indicates compatibility with IBT, though. If there turns out to be a problem, we'd have to revision the markup and disable IBT for all existing binaries (because we don't know which ones have the toolchain fix applied). I think we can keep the shadow stack markup because there will be ways to test for compatibility fairly soon. The risk is also fairly reduced for shadow stack because there are no code generation changes in generic code, while for IBT every function that has their address taken needs a different prologue. As far as I understand it, there won't be any i386 GNU/Linux support for shadow stacks, so -fhardened shouldn't enable it on that target. Furthermore, ENDBR32 is incompatible with the i386 baseline ISA because it's a long NOP. Thanks, Florian
