Re: [PATCH 00/31 v2] PTI support for x86_32

[Pavel Machek]

On Sun 2018-02-11 11:42:47, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> 
> 
> On Feb 11, 2018, at 9:40 AM, Mark D Rustad <mrustad@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> >> On Feb 11, 2018, at 2:59 AM, Adam Borowski <kilobyte@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >> 
> >>> Does Debian make it easy to upgrade to a 64-bit kernel if you have a
> >>> 32-bit install?
> >> 
> >> Quite easy, yeah.  Crossgrading userspace is not for the faint of the heart,
> >> but changing just the kernel is fine.
> > 
> > ISTR that iscsi doesn't work when running a 64-bit kernel with a 32-bit userspace. I remember someone offered kernel patches to fix it, but I think they were rejected. I haven't messed with that stuff in many years, so perhaps the userspace side now has accommodation for it. It might be something to check on.
> > 
> 
> At the risk of suggesting heresy, should we consider removing x86_32 support at some point?

We have just found out that majority of 64-bit machines are broken in
rather fundamental ways (Spectre) and Intel does not even look
interested in fixing that (because it would make them look bad on
benchmarks).

Even when the Spectre bug is mitigated... this looks like can of worms
that can not be closed.

OTOH -- we do know that there are non-broken machines out there,
unfortunately they are mostly 32-bit :-). Removing support for
majority of working machines may not be good idea...

[And I really hope future CPUs get at least option to treat cache miss
as a side-effect -- thus disalowed during speculation -- and probably
option to turn off speculation altogether. AFAICT, it should "only"
result in 50% slowdown -- or that was result in some riscv
presentation.]

									Pavel

-- 
(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
(cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: Digital signature