Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw • Hacker News Board

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#171

Post by im3w1l » Wed, Jan 03, 2018, 4:37 PM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #141

Avshalom wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea how or if this is a big deal but: >>attack that would be almost expected in a processor with speculative execution unless special measures were taken to prevent it. if you're going to put in features with expected attacks you should definitely be putting in features to prevent it , and if it is an expected attack it shouldn't be special measures it should just be an inherent part in introducing the fea…

When speculative execution (and caches) were invented and put into widespread use, no one thought about timing attacks, nor was the practice of running untrusted code on one's own machine common.

UNIX has been multi-user for a very long time and the intended use case is that those users not be able to compromise each other or get root.

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#172

Post by rbjorklin » Wed, Jan 03, 2018, 4:40 PM UTC

api wrote: post #108

vardump wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From what I've read, this slowdown only affects syscalls Incorrect. It also affects interrupts and (page) faults. Any usermode to kernel and back transition.

So this is evil for virtualization hosting, which is the major enterprise application for Intel chips. Hosting on bare metal will become more attractive. Too bad you can't long OVH and Hetzner.

For some reason I can’t reply to ‘chrisper’ but I think ‘api’ is referring to going long in the stock market.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/long.asp

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#173

Post by prudhvis » Wed, Jan 03, 2018, 4:42 PM UTC

oliwarner wrote: post #114

dsign wrote: post #19

This is a clusterf /big deal. Beyond the security implications, it means that all companies paying for computing resources will have to pay roughly 30% more overnight on cloud expenses for the same amount of CPU, assuming that they can just scale up their infrastructure. I know that bugs happen and that there was nothing intentional on this one, but at times like this is hard to held at bay the temptation of claiming…

As a billion other people have already said, that all depends on their workloads. This isn't a 30% clockspeed deduction.

As i understand the problem, this isn't about clockspeed reduction, now it is the software's responsibility to check if the page is a kernel page/user page. So, the impact is significant. So, every time either pages are touched/accessed this check needs to be triggered, which causes it to be much slower.

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#174

Post by ianai » Wed, Jan 03, 2018, 4:42 PM UTC

golfer wrote: post #168

cornholio wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> claiming for a class lawsuit against Intel If people who received written assurance from Intel that their hardware is 100% bug free can form a legal class, sure. I highly doubt there is even a single one such customer.

Anyone can sue anyone else at any time. If you think Intel isn't going to be sued for this, you're wrong.

They need some legal standing or the case can be dismissed out of hand. It may very well be a question of who has the better legal team.

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#175

Post by throwawazqq » Wed, Jan 03, 2018, 4:43 PM UTC

AMD stock price was higher in July and October. It increased a tiny bit and does not constitute “soaring”.

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#176

Post by chillydawg » Wed, Jan 03, 2018, 4:45 PM UTC

jcriddle4 wrote: post #135

rdtsc wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The privilege escalation is being fixed in software. The problem is that mitigation involves patching the kernel and that patch results in around 30% slowdown for some applications like databases or anything that does a lot of IO (disk and network). That's the big deal. Imagine you are running at close to full capacity after security fix reboot your service might tip over. It could mean a direct impact to cost and so…

I would love to see some SQL Server benchmarks on this patch

Likely very similar to the postgres benchmarks. Fundamentally a RDBMS needs to sync each transaction commit to the log file on disk and that sync is always a syscall. If your DB is doing thousands tx/sec to low latency flash and you rely on that low latency, you're going to get hit.

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#177

Post by chrisper » Wed, Jan 03, 2018, 4:46 PM UTC

golfer wrote: post #170

chrisper wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Too bad you can't long OVH and Hetzner. What does that even mean? Also Hetzner just introduced some AMD Epyc server.

"Long" as a verb means to purchase their stock. As opposed to "shorting" a stock, which means making a bet that it will go down in value.

Ah that makes sense. Thanks!

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#178

Post by cornholio » Wed, Jan 03, 2018, 4:48 PM UTC

golfer wrote: post #168

cornholio wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> claiming for a class lawsuit against Intel If people who received written assurance from Intel that their hardware is 100% bug free can form a legal class, sure. I highly doubt there is even a single one such customer.

Anyone can sue anyone else at any time. If you think Intel isn't going to be sued for this, you're wrong.

It depends on how they handle user compensation. Going by the FDIV precedent, they should typically replace all defective products for free, and they will be in the clear.

What I meant was that the presence of the bug itself is not a valid cause, for example you can't claim that due to the error you lost 1 trillion dollars via a software hack - even if it's true. If Intel can prove they acted ethically when disclosing the bug and that they replaced / compensated users up to the value of the CPU, they are in the clear.

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#179

Post by hbosch » Wed, Jan 03, 2018, 4:51 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #90

> AMD shares surged as much as 7.2 percent to $11.77 Wednesday. Intel fell as much as 3.8 percent, the most since April, to $45.05. An Intel spokesman declined to comment. I have no real context for this, but is 7.2% considered a "soar"? And a 3.8% decrease seems like kind of not a lot, considering what's fucking happening here.

A 7.2% rise intraday is pretty big, especially for traders holding leveraged positions. If you're comparing to crypto markets then no, but generally speaking yes.

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#180

Post by chrisper » Wed, Jan 03, 2018, 4:52 PM UTC

If you look here: https://www.computerbase.de/2018-01/intel-cpu-pti-sicherheit... (Sorry it is German)

But if you scroll down to "Windows-Benchmarks: Anwendungen" you can see that most applications do not have any performance hit with the Windows patch.

Only M.2 SSD seem to be affected.