One of the goals of the MCS scheduler is to allow untrusted parts of the system (such as device drivers) to still have low interrupt latency. However, this seems to interact badly with the domain scheduler, as interrupts can arrive when the domain that will serve them is not scheduled. Worse, it appears that interrupts will generally require an IBPB (or equivalent) on both entry and exit, since they may interrupt any code.
Is this accurate? If so, it seems that the “flush all μArch state” instruction coming to some RISC-V CPUs is insufficient, and full speculative taint tracking is required. More generally, requiring mutually distrusting domains to be explicitly marked seems to be problematic for anything that is not a static system: in a dynamic system (one that can run third-party code), one must typically assume that different address spaces are mutually distrusting, with the result that IPC latency will be severely impacted. Am I missing something, or will a general-purpose OS need full speculative taint tracking in hardware if it is to have fast IPCs between mutually-distrusting code on out-of-order CPUs? -- Sincerely, Demi Marie Obenour (she/her/hers) _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
