This is horrible, really really horrible. And I'm not talking about the bug itself, but the mitigation --- which is basically "stop using indirect jump and call instructions and recompile all your software". The latter is beyond unrealistic.
It also sets a very bad precedent: I understand people want to mitigate/fix as much as possible, but this is basically giving an implicit message to the hardware designers: "it doesn't matter if our instructions are broken, regardless of how widespread in use they already are --- they'll just fix it in the software."
> it doesn't matter if our instructions are broken, regardless of how widespread in use they already are --- they'll just fix it in the software.
What are any other options? It's hardware, that cannot be patched. Of course they will change chip designs going forward, but what else do you suggest folks do with the billions of chips that exhibit this problem?
It also sets a very bad precedent: I understand people want to mitigate/fix as much as possible, but this is basically giving an implicit message to the hardware designers: "it doesn't matter if our instructions are broken, regardless of how widespread in use they already are --- they'll just fix it in the software."