On Wed, 25 Jul 2018, Richard Earnshaw (lists) wrote: > >> Port maintainers DO need to decide what to do about speculation, even if > >> it is explicitly that no mitigation is needed. > > > > Agreed. But I didn't yet see a request for maintainers to decide that? > > > > consider it made, then :-)
I suggest the following as an appropriate process for anything needing attention from architecture maintainers: * Send a message to the gcc list, starting its own thread, CC:ed to all target architecture maintainers, stating explicitly in its first sentence that it is about something needing action from all such maintainers. The message needs to give all the information required for those maintainers to work out what is appropriate for their ports, or point to a wiki page with that information. For example, the message must not assume maintainer familiarity with Spectre - it must give sufficient information for maintainers unfamiliar with Spectre to work out what to do with their ports. * If the messages to any maintainers bounce, actively seek out alternative contact details for them or alternative people who might be interested in maintaining those ports. Likewise, it's necessary to check for any ports that do not have a listed maintainer in the MAINTAINERS file and find appropriate contacts for those. * Over the next few months, send occasional reminders, each including a list of the ports that have not been updated. * No backport should be considered for anything that might involve breakage, e.g. warnings, for unchanged ports, until either all ports have been updated or at least several months have passed. (Normally, a change needing architecture maintainer attention would be something for which backports are obviously inappropriate, e.g. a new C / C++ language feature requiring ABI decisions to be made for which there isn't an obvious default that can safely be applied to all architectures.) -- Joseph S. Myers jos...@codesourcery.com
