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by jpc0 932 days ago
> We can't be writing individual code for each N x M x O x P combination of hardware + software + workload + configuration

That is kind of exactly what you would do when optimising for popular platforms.

If this error occurs on an AMD Cpu used by half your users is your response to your user going to be "just buy a different CPU" or are you going to fix it in code and ship a "performance improvement on XYZ platform" update

3 comments

Nobody said "just buy a different CPU" anywhere in this discussion or the article. And they are pinning the root cause on AMD which is completely fair because they are the source of the issue.

Given that the fix is within the memory allocator, there is already a relatively trivial fix for users who really need it (recompile with jemalloc as the global memory allocator).

For everyone else, it's probably better to wait until AMD reports back with an analysis from their side and either recommends an "official" mitigation or pushes out a microcode update.

The fix is that AMD needs to develop, test and deploy a microcode update for their affected CPUs, and then the problem is truly fixed for everyone, not just the people who have detected the issue and tried to mitigate it.
Yeah, but even if you'd take this on as your responsibility (while it should really be the CPU vendor fixing it), you would like to resolve it much lower in the stack, like the Rust compiler/standard library or LLVM, and not individually in any Rust library that happens to stumble upon that problem.