Re: [PATCH] platform/x86: handle Intel CPUs falsely reporting as GenuineIotel

[H. Peter Anvin]

On July 4, 2026 11:29:52 AM PDT, Borislav Petkov <bp@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>On Sat, Jul 04, 2026 at 02:15:02PM -0400, Evalyn Goemer wrote:
>> > Overall, it's an outlier, and I'd flag such systems, not placate them.
>> 
>> Yeah it's a very strange thing I have found and thought could be worth 
>> handling. I ended up making the patch this way since this is the only case of 
>> this I could see as well other codebases online handled it similarly.
>
>Well, Sashiko pointed out a couple more places:
>
>https://sashiko.dev/#/patchset/20260704025147.585133-1-git%40evalyngoemer.com
>
>which would need to be taken care of too.
>
>But I tend to agree with Christian and even go a step further - completely
>stop booting on them. Because who knows what else has been tampered with in
>them.
>
>Yeah, yeah, bit flips, sure, but a system which generates bit flips reliably
>gets its DRAM replaced so why should we treat this thing differently...
>
>Let's see what Intel folks say here too.
>

To tell you the truth this is literally the first time I have heard of this at all! 

At the very least we should taint these as CPU_OUT_OF_SPEC. It doesn't seem like a bad idea either to halt *by default*.

I would like to see a command line option to override that behavior, though. Heck, an x86.cpu_vendor=<string> command line option might be useful for debugging in general.