Re: [RFC,05/10] x86/speculation: Add basic IBRS support infrastructure

[Eduardo Habkost]

On Wed, Jan 31, 2018 at 02:04:49PM +0000, Dr. David Alan Gilbert wrote:
> * Borislav Petkov (bp@xxxxxxx) wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 31, 2018 at 12:30:36PM +0000, Dr. David Alan Gilbert wrote:
> > > Indeed, it's only for this weird case where you suddenly need to change
> > > it.
> > 
> > No, there's more:
> > 
> > 	.name = "Broadwell-noTSX",
> > 	.name = "Haswell-noTSX",
> 
> Haswell came out and we made the CPU definition, and then got a
> microcode update that removed the feature.
> 
> So the common feature of noTSX and IBRS is that they're the only two
> cases where a CPU has released and then the flags have changed later.

Also, if anybody don't like it, users can already specify, e.g.,
"Broadwell,-hle,-rtm" or "Skylake,+spec_ctrl".

QEMU only adds have the -noTSX and -IBRS CPU for convenience of
management systems that don't know how to check/configure
individual CPU features.  We're working with libvirt and
OpenStack folks to make this kind of trick unnecessary.

-- 
Eduardo