STIBP by default.. Revert?

From: Linus Torvalds
Date: Sun Nov 18 2018 - 15:36:31 EST


This was marked for stable, and honestly, nowhere in the discussion
did I see any mention of just *how* bad the performance impact of this
was.

When performance goes down by 50% on some loads, people need to start
asking themselves whether it was worth it. It's apparently better to
just disable SMT entirely, which is what security-conscious people do
anyway.

So why do that STIBP slow-down by default when the people who *really*
care already disabled SMT?

I think we should use the same logic as for L1TF: we default to
something that doesn't kill performance. Warn once about it, and let
the crazy people say "I'd rather take a 50% performance hit than
worry about a theoretical issue".

Linus