Re: [PATCH v3] Documentation: Add section about CPU vulnerabilities for Spectre

[Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>]

On Mon, 17 Jun 2019 22:21:51 +0200 (CEST)
Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> wrote:

> > +Spectre variant 1 attacks take advantage of speculative execution of
> > +conditional branches, while Spectre variant 2 attacks use speculative
> > +execution of indirect branches to leak privileged memory. See [1] [5]
> > +[7] [10] [11].  
> 
> It would be great to actually link these [N] to the actual http link at the
> bottom. No idea what's the best way to do that.
> 
> Jonathan?

Append an underscore to the link text, so:

	See [1_] [5_] ...
	
Then, when adding the links:

	.. _1: https://.../

There are other ways; see

    http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/rst/quickref.html#external-hyperlink-targets 

for the list.

> The below renders horribly when converted to HTML
> 
> You probably want to wrap these into a table
> 
> > +	nospectre_v2	[X86] Disable all mitigations for the Spectre variant 2
> > +			(indirect branch prediction) vulnerability. System may
> > +			allow data leaks with this option, which is equivalent
> > +			to spectre_v2=off.
> > +
> > +
> > +        spectre_v2=     [X86] Control mitigation of Spectre variant 2
> > +			(indirect branch speculation) vulnerability.
> > +			The default operation protects the kernel from
> > +			user space attacks.  
> 
> Maybe Jonathan has a better idea.

The easiest thing is probably a definition list:

	nospectre_v2
	    [X86] Disable all mitigations for the Spectre variant 2
	    (indirect branch prediction) ...

	spectrev2=
	    ...

i.e. just move the descriptive text into an indented block below the term
of interest.

jon