There are several mitigations that use the VERW instruction to clean up internal CPU buffers. Currently, each of these mitigations is treated independently, but if VERW is needed for one of the mitigations, it's on for all of them. This can lead to some confusion if a user tries to disable one of the mitigations, but it is left enabled for one of the others. The user would have to disable all 4 VERW based mitigations. This series aims to make it easier for the end user to disable VERW based mitigations by introducing a single parameter to control all of them. This makes the individual parameters redundant, so they are removed. It may be desirable to keep the old individual parameters for the sake of backwards compatibility. Daniel Sneddon (6): x86/bugs: Create single parameter for VERW based mitigations x86/bugs: Remove MDS command line x86/bugs: Remove TAA kernel parameter. x86/bugs: Remove MMIO kernel parameter x86/bugs: Remove RFDS kernel parameter. x86/bugs: Clean-up verw mitigations .../admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt | 143 +-------- arch/x86/kernel/cpu/bugs.c | 287 +++++++----------- 2 files changed, 118 insertions(+), 312 deletions(-) -- 2.25.1
