Re: [PATCH v1] x86/cpu/tsx: Change the TSX default from "off" to "auto"

From: Thomas Gleixner
Date: Wed May 06 2020 - 21:11:35 EST


Nelson D'Souza <nelson.dsouza@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> There are now several commercially available processors that have h/w
> fixes for the TSX Async Abort (TAA) issue as indicated by enumerating
> the ARCH_CAPABILITIES "TAA_NO" bit.
>
> Change the default setting to "auto" so that these CPUs will leave
> TSX enabled by default.

You are telling WHAT the patch does, but not the WHY.

It's completely uninteresting whether TAA is fixed in a particular CPU
simply because:

1) TAA is only one particular issue of TSX.

2) The main use case for TSX is to accelerate all sorts of
speculation attacks and other malignances

3) There is excatly ONE known use case which cares about TSX and we
already discussed to death that the machines on which that use
case runs have admins which are capable of adding tsx=on on the
command line.

So unless you come up with some really convincing argument why this
should be changed, this is not going to happen.

Thanks,

tglx