Given that I'm not going to change the way the existing predicates work, if I move the "fallback" setting `max_bhb_k` to 32 to spectre_bhb_enable_mitigation() then when we set `max_bhb_k` becomes inconsistent between recognized and unrecognized CPUs.
A clean way to fix that could be to change spectre_bhb_loop_affected() to just return the K-value (rather than change max_bhb_k directly), and then set max_bhb_k to the max() of that return value and the existing value when it is called from spectre_bhb_enable_mitigation(). That way, max_bhb_k would only be updated from spectre_bhb_enable_mitigation().
I would also say that having `max_bhb_k` get set in an inconsistent place opens us up for bugs in the future. Even if it works today, I imagine someone could change things in the future such that spectre_bhb_enable_mitigation() reads `max_bhb_k` and essentially caches it (maybe it constructs an instruction based on it). If that happened things could be subtly broken for the "unrecognized CPU" case because the first CPU would "cache" the value without it having been called on all CPUs.
This would likely already be a problem with the current code, since spectre_bhb_enable_mitigations() is called one at a time for each CPU and the max_bhb_k value is only valid once it has been called on all CPUs. If someone tried to just immediately use the value inside the function that would just be a bug either way. (Right now this should not be a problem because max_bhb_k is only used by spectre_bhb_patch_loop_iter() which ends up being called through apply_alternatives_all(), which should only run after all those CPU errata cpu_enable callbacks have been called.)