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Date: Thu, 4 Jan 2018 10:36:01 -0800
From: Alexei Starovoitov <alexei.starovoitov@gmail.com>
To: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: David Woodhouse <dwmw@amazon.co.uk>,
        Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com>, Paul Turner <pjt@google.com>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linux-foundation.org>,
        Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@linux.intel.com>,
        Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com>,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>,
        Kees Cook <keescook@google.com>,
        Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>,
        Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>,
        Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>,
        Jiri Kosina <jikos@kernel.org>,
        One Thousand Gnomes <gnomes@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 01/13] x86/retpoline: Add initial retpoline support
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On Thu, Jan 04, 2018 at 10:25:35AM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 4, 2018 at 10:17 AM, Alexei Starovoitov
> <alexei.starovoitov@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Clearly Paul's approach to retpoline without lfence is faster.
> > I'm guessing it wasn't shared with amazon/intel until now and
> > this set of patches going to adopt it, right?
> >
> > Paul, could you share a link to a set of alternative gcc patches
> > that do retpoline similar to llvm diff ?
> 
> What is the alternative approach? Is it literally just doing a
> 
>       call 1f
> 1:    mov real_target,(%rsp)
>        ret
> 
> on the assumption that the "ret" will always just predict to that "1"
> due to the call stack?

Pretty much.
Paul's writeup: https://support.google.com/faqs/answer/7625886
tldr: jmp *%r11 gets converted to:
call set_up_target;
capture_spec:
  pause;
  jmp capture_spec;
set_up_target:
  mov %r11, (%rsp);
  ret;
where capture_spec part will be looping speculatively.