Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 25 Mar 2008 13:38:06 -0700 | From | "H. Peter Anvin" <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] x86: pat cpu feature bit setting for known cpus |
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Ingo Molnar wrote: > * Venki Pallipadi <venkatesh.pallipadi@intel.com> wrote: > >>>> OK, note previous question: what is the motivation for having >>>> this as a whitelist (as opposed to a blacklist)? >>> Venkatesh could tell? >> Main reason for white-list at this point is not to be side-tracked by >> real or potential erratas on older CPUs. Focussing on getting the >> support for this feature on current and future CPUs. If older CPUs >> have survived all these days without this feature, they should be >> doing OK. > > well, the upside would be that since most testing of Linux kernels is > done on _old_ hardware (people tend to risk their old hw first ;-), we'd > get faster convergence of the codebase, even though we have the risk of > erratas (known and unknown ones alike). Code that artificially limits > its utility is almost always slow to stabilize. >
Yes, using a whitelist of this type is wrong, IMO, and smells faintly of vendor-lockin.
-hpa
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