[Cryptography] Speculation considered harmful?

[Nico Williams]

On Wed, Jan 10, 2018 at 03:24:49PM -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 10, 2018 at 10:02:50AM -0600, Nico Williams wrote:
> > VLIW == no stable ABI.  We'd have to ship bitcode and re-optimize,
> > assemble, and link for every VLIW CPU model.
> > 
> > It wouldn't be the end of the world.  But first we'd need the compilers
> > that could handle it.
> 
> That alone would probably doom an architecture with VLIW from a
> commercial perspective.  Think about what this means from a software
> vendor's perspective.  Or from a Linux Distribution's perspective.

We accept JIT in lots of contexts, so why not just always?  I'm not
saying that *would* work.  I'm saying this concern might not be so
severe.

Before Meltdown/Spectre I'd have said (and did say whenever the topic
came up) that VLIW was dead.  Now there's a new opportunity for VLIW
research.  *Research*.  I'd not expect a revolution in CPU architecture.