Click to access Managing-Speculation-on-AMD-Processors.pdf
White Paper: SOFTWARE TECHNIQUES FOR MANAGING SPECULATION ON AMD PROCESSORS
Speculative execution is a basic principle of all modern processor designs and is critical to support high performance hardware. Recently, researchers have discussed techniques to exploit the speculative behavior of x86 processors and other processors to leak information to unauthorized code * . This paper describes software options to manage speculative execution on AMD processors ** to mitigate the risk of information leakage. Some of these options require a microcode patch that exposes new features to software. The software exploits have recently developed a language around them to make them easier to reference so it is good to review them before we start discussing the architecture and mitigation techniques.