On 16/02/2018 12:57, Dr. David Alan Gilbert wrote: > It's a bit weird to end up pointing to them to a lkml post; > Paolo: Any ideas on anything better to say?
IBRS is really that much slower than retpolines on pre-Skylake machines, so it's a hard call to tell people to use it. It looks like Intel is going to add Yet Another Bit to clean up the Skylake mess; in the meanwhile I would just use retpolines even on Skylake and newer machines, because the Spectre attacks are much more theoretical than Meltdown, but it's good to point out the issue for the paranoid folks. Paolo