> Specifying "gather_data_sampling=force" will use the microcode mitigation when
> available or disable AVX on affected systems where the microcode hasn't been
> updated to include the mitigation.
Disclaimer: I work on Linux at Intel. I probably wrote or tweaked the documentation and changelogs that are confusing folks.
From https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... :
> Specifying "gather_data_sampling=force" will use the microcode mitigation when > available or disable AVX on affected systems where the microcode hasn't been > updated to include the mitigation.
Disclaimer: I work on Linux at Intel. I probably wrote or tweaked the documentation and changelogs that are confusing folks.