Re: Avoid speculative indirect calls in kernel

[Dave Hansen]

On 01/04/2018 10:49 PM, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 05, 2018 at 01:54:13AM +0100, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
>> On Thu, 4 Jan 2018, Jon Masters wrote:
>>> P.S. I've an internal document where I've been tracking "nice to haves"
>>> for later, and one of them is whether it makes sense to tag binaries as
>>> "trusted" (e.g. extended attribute, label, whatever). It was something I
>>> wanted to bring up at some point as potentially worth considering.
>> Scratch that. There is no such thing as a trusted binary.
> I disagree with you on this Thomas. "trusted" means "we agree to share the
> risk this binary takes because it's critical to our service". When you
> build a load balancing appliance on which 100% of the service is assured
> by a single executable and the rest is just config management, you'd better
> trust that process.

So you want to run this "one binary" as fast as possible and without
mitigations in place?  But, you want mitigations *available* on that
system at the same time?  For what?  If there's only one binary, why not
just disable the mitigations entirely?