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From:   Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date:   Thu, 7 Feb 2019 22:53:01 +0000
Message-ID: <CAHk-=wiZ3t_YbtRz1tLTEvF0JS1DH07DdDR3FP-FHcZW8wfSAw@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [GIT PULL] x86/mm changes for v4.21
To:     Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>
Cc:     "Luck, Tony" <tony.luck@intel.com>,
        Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>,
        Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>,
        Linux List Kernel Mailing <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com>,
        Andy Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org>,
        Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de>,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>,
        Rik van Riel <riel@surriel.com>
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On Thu, Feb 7, 2019 at 1:24 PM Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net> wrote:
>
> How bad would it be to set CR0.CD while fiddling with the page tables rather than masking the address?

I would suggest against it. When you disable caching, things don't
just go "slightly slower". Everything comes to a screeching halt, with
instruction fetch etc becoming a serious problem.

So disabling caching for a few instructions in a very simple asm
snippet might be reasonable (particularly since you could pre-fetch
the cache and just rely on CR0.CD not fetching *new* lines). But doing
it in C code that might have things like tracing enabled etc? I'd be
very very leery.

                 Linus