I agree that this should be at an OS level, and coarse-grained.
Direct access to fine-grained cycle counters are well-known to be used for timing-based attacks. (Not just Spectre and Meltdown but also for reducing the time to guess passwords, encryption keys, etc, etc.). A whole field of “constant time algorithms” has arisen to combat it, which is a bit unnecessary IMHO.
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This reply was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by
Findecanor.