Messages in this thread |  | | | Date | Tue, 25 Mar 2008 16:01:14 -0700 | | From | "H. Peter Anvin" <> | | Subject | Re: [PATCH] x86: pat cpu feature bit setting for known cpus | |
H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> 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.
>
By the way, I want to clarify: I didn't mean it was *intended* as
vendor-lockin, just that it's an undesirable effect of this.
-hpa
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