Re: STIBP by default.. Revert?

[Ingo Molnar]

* Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> This was marked for stable, and honestly, nowhere in the discussion
> did I see any mention of just *how* bad the performance impact of this
> was.

Yeah. This was an oversight - we'll fix it!

> When performance goes down by 50% on some loads, people need to start
> asking themselves whether it was worth it. It's apparently better to
> just disable SMT entirely, which is what security-conscious people do
> anyway.
> 
> So why do that STIBP slow-down by default when the people who *really*
> care already disabled SMT?
> 
> I think we should use the same logic as for L1TF: we default to
> something that doesn't kill performance. Warn once about it, and let
> the  crazy people say "I'd rather take a 50% performance hit than
> worry about a theoretical issue".

Yeah, absolutely.

We'll also require performance measurements in changelogs enabling any 
sort of mitigation feature from now on - this requirement was implicit 
but 53c613fe6349 flew in under the radar, so it's going to be explicit an 
explicit requirement.

Thanks,

	Ingo