Re: [PATCH 0/2] x86/fred: enable FRED by default

[Borislav Petkov]

On Tue, Mar 24, 2026 at 10:19:00AM -0700, Sohil Mehta wrote:
> With FRED proposed to be default on, I think we should match the above
> and only let fred=off disable it. All other inputs should be ignored.

So we have only said so far that "on" enables FRED and "off" disables it. And
we can do that by carving out the FRED option parsing into a separate function
and acting only on those and ignoring the rest.

All those other fred=X things should simply be ignored.

> I agree. In general, we shouldn't even need special command line
> parameters to *disable* features. clearcpuid=fred would have been
> equivalent to fred=off if it didn't taint the kernel. I don't know the
> exact history about why the taint is needed.

Because you should not poke at clearing CPUID features unless you know what
you're doing and this cmdline option should not exist at all. But we have it
so...

-- 
Regards/Gruss,
    Boris.

https://people.kernel.org/tglx/notes-about-netiquette