Re:Downfall Attacks
by hinkley on Tuesday August 08, 2023 @06:08PM
(#37056109)
This seems like a job for Arm or RISC-V or ???
Sacrifice IPC/core to reduce gates per core, stuff more cores into a square centimeter, pin processes to cores or groups of cores, keep thread preemption cheap, but let thread migration take as long as it takes.
Arm already has asymmetric multiprocessing, which I feel like is halfway there. Or maybe a third. Fifteen years ago asynchrony primitives weren’t what they are today. I think there’s more flexibility to design a core around current or emerging primitives instead of the old ways. And then there are kernel primitives like io_uring meant to reduce system call overhead, amortizing over multiple calls. If you split the difference, you could afford to allow individual calls to get several times more expensive, while juggling five or ten at once for the cost of two.
Sacrifice IPC/core to reduce gates per core, stuff more cores into a square centimeter, pin processes to cores or groups of cores, keep thread preemption cheap, but let thread migration take as long as it takes.
Arm already has asymmetric multiprocessing, which I feel like is halfway there. Or maybe a third. Fifteen years ago asynchrony primitives weren’t what they are today. I think there’s more flexibility to design a core around current or emerging primitives instead of the old ways. And then there are kernel primitives like io_uring meant to reduce system call overhead, amortizing over multiple calls. If you split the difference, you could afford to allow individual calls to get several times more expensive, while juggling five or ten at once for the cost of two.