Re: [RFC] #MC mess

Peter Zijlstra
2020-02-19T15:05:28Z

On Wed, Feb 19, 2020 at 09:21:15AM -0500, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> On Wed, 19 Feb 2020 09:15:41 +0100
> Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> wrote:
>
> > >
> > > Tony, etc, can you ask your Intel contacts who care about this kind of
> > > thing to stop twiddling their thumbs and FIX IT? The easy fix is
> > > utterly trivial. Add a new instruction IRET_NON_NMI. It does
> > > *exactly* the same thing as IRET except that it does not unmask NMIs.
> > > (It also doesn't unmask NMIs if it faults.) No fancy design work.
> > > Future improvements can still happen on top of this.
> >
> > Yes please! Of course, we're stuck with the existing NMI entry crap
> > forever because legacy, but it would make all things NMI so much saner.
>
> What would be nice is to have a NMI_IRET, that is defined as something
> that wont break legacy CPUs. Where it could be just a nop iret, or maybe
> if possible a "lock iret"? That is, not have a IRET_NON_NMI, as that
> would be all over the place, but just the iret for NMI itself. As
> that's in one place.

I don't think that matters much; alternatives should be able to deal
with all that either which way around.