In the light of all the recent Intel Vulnerabilities with speculative execution, can speculative execution be fully disabled to protect from all this vulnerabilities, from BIOS or OS kernel?
Maybe stupid question, but is it possible?
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Maybe OS kernel may not use speculative execution? – user3604665 Aug 25 '18 at 06:12
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No, it's not possible. Supporting a feature like that would require major changes to the microarchtiecture. Also disabling speculative execution is not the right approach so solve the problem. Speculative execution is so critical for performance, but it can be performed more securely, which is what likely will happen in successor microarchtiectures.
Hadi Brais
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1I'm sure there are chicken bits you could set in microcode that would do that. – forest May 12 '21 at 03:51