Re: Privilege Levels Below User

On Sun, 09 Jun 2024 16:52:45 GMT, anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at
(Anton Ertl) wrote:

The proper answer to hardware bugs is not adding software limitations,
nor software mitigations (what the hardware makers suggest), but to
fix the hardware.

In the case of Spectre, fixing the hardware has a cost in performance.
So allowing the processor to run code with out-of-order execution
turned off for that code is a way to limit the performance loss to the
untrusted code.

And this would work well on my Concertina II architecture, where VLIW
features, such as the break bit, and extended register banks of 128
registers each, are present. Code can be generated that avoids
register hazards when run in order.

John Savard