Re: [PATCH] Mutilated form of Andi Kleen's AMD prefetch errata patch

Jamie Lokier
2003-09-30T23:58:10Z

Dave Jones wrote:
> Which gets us back to the question of why this is needed at all ?
> You said earlier "In case you hadn't fully grokked it, my code doesn't
> disable the workaround!" So why do you need this ?

To change the prefetch workaround from a critical requirement to an
optimisation knob.

X86_USE_3DNOW is very similar: if it's enabled, the kernel has some
extra code to make certain CPUs run faster, but they also run fine
without it. X86_OOSTORE is another.

What I'd really like your opinion on is the appropriate userspace
behaviour. If we don't care about fixing up userspace, then
__ex_table is a much tidier workaround for the prefetch bug. If we do
care about fixing up userspace, then do we need a policy decision that
says it's not acceptable to run on AMD without userspace fixups from
2.6.0 onwards - it must fixup userspace or refuse to run?

-- Jamie