Hacker News Reader

The counterpoint is that variable-length decoding introduces sequential dependence in the decoding, i.e. you don’t know where instruction 2 starts until you’ve decoded instruction 1. This probably limits how many decoders you can have. If you know all your instructions are 4B you can basically decode as many as you want in parallel.

View on HN

A larger problem is that they're bad for security; you can hide malicious instructions from static analysis by jumping into the middle of a cleaner one. Or use it to find more ROP gadgets, etc.

I can imagine ways to deal with this, but x86 doesn't have them.

I think what happen in practice is that the decoders still speculatively decode in parallel then drop all misdecoded instructions. Easy when instructions have only a couple of sizes. Hard and wasteful for something like x86.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com