x86 Straight Line Speculation Mitigation Being Back-Ported To GCC 11

[phoronix]

Phoronix: x86 Straight Line Speculation Mitigation Being Back-Ported To GCC 11

There sure has been a lot of x86 straight-line speculation happenings in recent months with the compiler-based mitigation being merged for GCC 12 and then beginning with Linux 5.17 the kernel can make use of that new knob for fending off this potential vulnerability. Now the compiler support is even being back-ported to GCC 11...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=x86-SLS-Backport-GCC-11

[microcode]

"even"? Isn't GCC 11 literally from last year?

[milkylainen]

I shrug when I think about the fugly hoops software needs to jump through to get sane behavior from hardware...

[GreenReaper]

"even"? Isn't GCC 11 literally from last year?

Sure, but its features are from November 2020. Not sure how usual it is for new features to be incorporated into GCC point releases, even if they are security-related - GCC 11.2 didn't have them.

[ms178]

One new flag

-mharden-sls=none

to set to keep performance?!

[PluMGMK]

This doesn't affect performance, only output binary size.