Does it make sense to compile the linux kernel with -Fhardened?
I think the affected distros also ended up removing the check over other issues.
Especially in kernel, is the likelihood of bugs so big that we increase the electricity consumption of everyone using Linux by default?
Sidechannel mitigations are not valid comparison, since it is protection against known, reproducible issues, not against "maybe there is a serious bug".
We should utilize the gains we get in increased computational power instead of wasting everything to inefficient software.
Machines are still not efficient enough to use garbage collected languages alone, which do not have the issues these compiler options mitigate. With efficient software, we can reduce the electricity bill and other resources.
And yet, horribly inefficient scripting languages are a thing. To save time of 1 or 2 developers ONCE, at the cost of countless users' compute capacity, again & again for as long as that software is used.
As long as that is considered acceptable, your argument holds no water.
Current hardware is way, way, waaayy fast enough for 99.999% of uses. Hardened software or not.
It is true that it costs more to hire more skilled developers, and for that reason we suffer. (e.g. Electron).
But even if that happens all the time, it does not mean that my point is invalid. If we want to reduce the energy waste, it starts from software as well.
> Current hardware is way, way, waaayy fast enough for 99.999% of uses. Hardened software or not.
For end-users yes, but not for any cloud computing, servers, et. all where the real computing happens. You can make significant saving in terms of required processors, memory and electricity simply by writing more efficient software. Just one method more to make world greener place.
E.g. compare to increased popularity of Rust and what it means in this context.
On Linux kernel the performance impact was from 2% to up to 25% and size increased around 30%.
On Android there was too much variance, but they note that Google got around 2-3% overhead, which sounds reasonable.
Without hardware acceleration (e.g. Intel CET), it will likely come with great cost. But we are yet to see those benchmarks.
But I would argue that you can take bigger impact for performance on Android or consumer phones anyway, since they are not performing high computation 24/7 usually, and they already have more computation power than most users require.
https://www.duo.uio.no/bitstream/handle/10852/79829/master.p...