Re: V6: [PATCH] x86: Install <sys/platform/x86.h> [BZ #26124]

[Florian Weimer <fweimer@redhat.com>]

* H. J. Lu via Libc-alpha:

> Small update:
>
> const struct cpu_features *
> __x86_get_cpu_features (unsigned int max, int cpuid)
> {
>   if (cpuid)
>     {
>       if (max > COMMON_CPUID_INDEX_MAX)
> 	return NULL;
>     }
>   else if (max > USABLE_FEATURE_INDEX_MAX)
>     return NULL;
>   return &GLRO(dl_x86_cpu_features);
> }
>
> Don't return NULL when checking the cpuid array when COMMON_CPUID_INDEX_MAX
> is unchanged, but USABLE_FEATURE_INDEX_MAX is changed.

I think these changes address the fundamental technical issues, thanks.

The patch needs to be rebased on top of
4fdd4d41a17dda26c854ed935658154a17d4b906 ("x86: Detect Intel Advanced
Matrix Extensions").

One thing I still dislike (sorry) is the asymmetry between the usable
and feature checks.  For example, why is there are usability check for
VAES, but not for AES?  I believe the reason is that VAES depends on
AVX/AVX2, but AES only depends on SSE2.  But even that suggests to me
that for 32-bit, there should be a usable gate for that (which is false
if SSE2 support has been masked).

I think it would be more consistent to expose the usable/feature
distinction for all features, and carry that over to the internal ABI,
too.  This way, we can give accurate reporting in cases where the
usability turned out to be firmware-dependent in the end (as it happened
with RDRAND).  That would need additional feature-specific work; by
default, we would still report such features as unsupported at the CPU
level.  Having both bits exposed in all cases also protects us against
cases where we need to change the usability detection logic in a later
release.

There is a bit of a tension here regarding agility because new usable
bits will only become set after glibc update.  But I don't see a way to
avoid this, not without teaching programmers to bypass the usable checks
(which leads to bugs, of course).

The interface with the max and cpuid arguments is quite close to the one
I proposed further up-thread.  I still think it has quite a few
advantages.  Should I implement it?  I could have something by the end
of the week, so we should still be able to make the ABI freeze.

Thanks,
Florian