Agree with Linus, why is it kernel developers’ problem to clean up the fallout of CPU manufacturers mistakes? We just need to accept past assumptions about process isolation are over. Do sensitive computation on a dedicated, separate CPU.
When I study the architecture of newly released processors, I'm overwhelmed by the complexity. Branch prediction, pipelining, superscalar, etc, etc. I consider modern CPUs to be excessively complicated due to programming languages still mostly being single imperative execution stream oriented.
It's difficult to see how this will change, though. We've had the dream of automatic parallelization by Sufficiently Smart Compilers (which turned out to be insufficiently smart) and the dream of automatic parallization of pure functional code (which turns out not to yield reliable performance gains in practice). No-one wants to write explicitly parallel code if they can possibly avoid it, so it falls to CPUs to desequentialise the code.
Agree with Linus, why is it kernel developers’ problem to clean up the fallout of CPU manufacturers mistakes? We just need to accept past assumptions about process isolation are over. Do sensitive computation on a dedicated, separate CPU.
When I study the architecture of newly released processors, I'm overwhelmed by the complexity. Branch prediction, pipelining, superscalar, etc, etc. I consider modern CPUs to be excessively complicated due to programming languages still mostly being single imperative execution stream oriented.
It's difficult to see how this will change, though. We've had the dream of automatic parallelization by Sufficiently Smart Compilers (which turned out to be insufficiently smart) and the dream of automatic parallization of pure functional code (which turns out not to yield reliable performance gains in practice). No-one wants to write explicitly parallel code if they can possibly avoid it, so it falls to CPUs to desequentialise the code.