Re: Another security vulnerability

Thomas Koenig wrote:

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> schrieb:

Since each chased pointer starts back at LSQ, the cost is no different
than an explicit Prefetch instruction, except without (a),(b) and (c)
having been applied first.

>
I thought the important difference is that the decision to prefetch or
not can be done dynamically based on past history.

Programmers and compilers are notoriously bad at predicting
branches (except for error branches),

Which are always predicted to have no error.

                                      but ought to be quite good
at predicting prefetches.

What makes you think programmers understand prefetches any better than
exceptions ??
 

                          If a pointer is loaded, chances are
very high that are it will be dereferenced.

What if the value loaded is NULL.