On Thu, 2018-01-25 at 18:11 -0800, Liran Alon wrote:
> 
> P.S:
> It seems to me that all these issues could be resolved completely at
> hardware in future CPUs if BTB/BHB/RSB entries were tagged with
> prediction-mode (or similar metadata). It will be nice if Intel/AMD
> could share if that is the planned long-term solution instead of
> IBRS-all-the-time.

IBRS-all-the-time is tagging with the ring and VMX root/non-root mode,
it seems. That much they could slip into the upcoming generation of
CPUs. And it's supposed to be fast¹; none of the dirty hacks in
microcode that they needed to implement the first-generation IBRS.

But we still need to tag with ASID/VMID and do proper flushing for
those, before we can completely ditch the need to do IBPB at the right
times.

Reading between the lines, I don't think they could add *that* without
stopping the fabs for a year or so while they go back to the drawing
board. But yes, I sincerely hope they *are* planning to do it, and
expose a 'SPECTRE_NO' bit in IA32_ARCH_CAPABILITIES, as soon as is
humanly possible.



¹ Fast enough that we'll want to use it and ALTERNATIVE out the 
  retpolines.