[MODERATED] Re: [patch 07/11] [PATCH v2 07/10] Linux Patch #7

[Borislav Petkov <bp@suse.de>]

On Sat, Apr 21, 2018 at 02:41:13PM -0700, speck for Linus Torvalds wrote:
> At the risk of bike shedding, can we *please* just write out "Store buffer 
> bypass" and "Memory disambiguation" instead of using SBB amd MD?
> 
> The patches aren't so big, and these names won't be used so much that we 
> can't use longer names. Yes, yes, we use PTI for the page table isolation, 
> but that had a much wider impact. For Spectre v1 we at least use _half_ 
> words like "nospec".
> 
> Maybe even X86_FEATURE_STBUF_BYPASS?
> 
> And X86_FEATURE_STBUF_BYPASS_MITIGATE?

So those strings after X86_FEATURE will land in /proc/cpuinfo and
traditionally, we have kept the feature names there abbreviated. Well,
at least most of them.

The only feature where this matters, though, is the memory
disambiguation feature which should be in /proc/cpuinfo, IMO, so should
we call it

	X86_FEATURE_MEM_DISAMBG

or so?

/proc/cpuinfo will have then "mem_disambg" or we can put the string we wanna
have in "":

#define X86_FEATURE_MEM_DISAMBG		...	/* "string_we_wanna_have" memory disambiguation */

The remaining ones are synthetic ones and they can be as long as
we want them to be as we won't show them in /proc/cpuinfo. The
current state of the mitigation will be, as with the other bugs, in
/sys/devices/system/cpu/vulnerabilities/

-- 
Regards/Gruss,
    Boris.

SUSE Linux GmbH, GF: Felix Imendörffer, Jane Smithard, Graham Norton, HRB 21284 (AG Nürnberg)
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