Yep. Unconditional branches require BTB entries anyway if they're to be predicted ahead of decode, and if AMD's BTB was large and accurate enough then the incre

Yep. Unconditional branches require BTB entries anyway if they're to be predicted ahead of decode, and if AMD's BTB was large and accurate enough then the incremental performance advantage of detecting not-taken direct branches after decode might not have been worthwhile. Security, sure arguably it could have been caught there. But Linux kernel development does not have the high ground when it comes to security problems.