On 2018-01-05 09:06, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
On 01/05/2018 08:50 AM, Alan Browne wrote:
On 2018-01-04 15:43, DaveFroble wrote:
chrisv wrote:
Designed By India H1B Engineers wrote:

Crucially, these updates to both Linux and Windows will incur a
performance hit on Intel products. The effects are still being
benchmarked, however we're looking at a ballpark figure of five to
30 per cent slow down, depending on the task and the processor model.

This is ugly.Â* Think of the large computing centers, for example
Google's data centers.Â* Suddenly, they will need significantly more
CPU time, and thus electricity (and thus carbon), to get the job done?


And once all the spanners are tossed into the works, which will slow
things down, what happens when new CPUs without the issues are
available?Â* Will computers forever be artificially slowed down?

A whole bunch of someones has seriously dropped the ball on this.
Protected memory should be just that, protected, with no way to avoid
the protection.

I presume it's an implementation flaw, not a principle-of-design flaw.
So once addressed, it should result in both proper memory protection
and increased performance in future cores.Â* Alas (per the article)
this can't be addressed with a microcode patch.


Sounds more like a "principle-of-design" flaw to me.Â* Hard to
believe all those different companies all made the same mistake
building on a sound design.

Call as you like I'll stick to my version. "All"? What? 2?

They have similar design goals so having similar attacks on the problem
aren't a surprise. Indeed in their communities ideas fly around
somewhat freely before implementation puts them under proprietary
"protection".

The failure (I'm speculating) is in design implementation and failure to
test the intent of the security in an OS environment.

Further speculation: the CPU h/w designers are a couple steps away from
OS designers and their understanding of OS concerns doesn't see clearly
to how to design the security tests.

--
“When it is all said and done, there are approximately 94 million
full-time workers in private industry paying taxes to support 102
million non-workers and 21 million government workers.
In what world does this represent a strong job market?�
..Jim Quinn