On Mon, Apr 20, 2020 at 12:13 PM Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Mon, Apr 20, 2020 at 11:20 AM Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: [..] > I really really detest the whole mcsafe garbage. And I absolutely > *ABHOR* how nobody inside of Intel has apparently ever questioned the > brokenness at a really fundamental level. > > That "I throw my hands in the air and just give up" thing is a > disease. It's absolutely not "what else could we do". So I grew up in the early part of my career validating ARM CPUs where a data-abort was either precise or imprecise and the precise error could be handled like a page fault as you know which instruction faulted and how to restart the thread. So I didn't take x86 CPU designers' word for it, I honestly thought that "hmm the x86 machine check thingy looks like it's trying to implement precise vs imprecise data-aborts, and precise / synchronous is maybe a good thing because it's akin to a page fault". I didn't consider asynchronous to be better because that means there is a gap between when the data corruption is detected and when it might escape the system that some external agent could trust the result and start acting on before the asynchronous signal is delivered.
