131–140 of 337 posts
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I believe AMD lets you disable it from BIOS.
I've seen this claim a few times but never seen it solidly verified. Can anyone make the case either way?
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As far as I understand: * In general you cannot. * You can try to remove ME with non-official tools like https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner * Some vendors ship specific laptops with ME disabled ( https://fossbytes.com/laptops-intel-me-chip-disabled/ ) * For servers or desktops, you can plug in a separate PCI network adapter instead of using the one on the mainboard (please correct me if this is wrong or confirm it a…
me_cleaner does not disable the ME. It is a partial disablement of ME functionality, but some functionality remains enabled. The ME firmware is an Intel-signed proprietary binary blob part of which is instrumental in the system boot process, so complete removal is impossible. me_cleaner and/or the HAP bit, or the services offered by laptop vendors which is basically doing the very same for you, may certainly reduce t…
The next stage would be to disassemble the bringup modules and figure out what exactly they do by reverse engineering, and implement that part independently. People are working on this. So far there is no indication that any of the problematic functionality is in the bringup module.
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How is this Intel ME CPU patch deployed and where does it actually go? Is there some tiny flash in the CPU itself where the Intel ME code resides? Or does the patch get deployed as part of a UEFI firmware update, but isn't actually part of UEFI firmware, and somehow the CPU can reach out and grab its own updates from UEFI?
Usually a separate patch, an ME firmware patch. The ME is physically located in the chipset but I'm not entirely sure where the FW resides, whether the chipset or a flash on the motherboard (sharing with the system UEFI/BIOS).
Finally it happened. Here's to hoping that after being exposed to this kind of risk, enterprises and regular customers start being more inquisitive about what code gets embedded into their hardware and why.
I heard Google spends a lot of money and effort to (slowly) move to Power9. It does have a management processor but it's open for inspection and modification. Maybe other cloud providers, and/or private clouds, would consider that.
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Certainly if the lifespan of Intel chips turns out to be much shorter than the marketplace expected (because Intel is unable to provide security updates), that affects the value of Intel products and ought to inform future buying decisions. Whether it is the unfortunate materialization of Spectre-style bugs or the deliberately insecure-by-design ME, Intel's inability to support its products is dismaying.
The ordinary life cycle of an Intel CPU is the five t̶h̶r̶e̶e̶ year depreciation schedule in the US tax system. The life cycle for Intel's most important customers is less and is based on operating cost in large data centers and these are driven by density, throughput, and energy utilization. Traditionally this has been two years or less as reflected in Intel's tick-tock iteration strategy. The critical life cycle fo…
Intel advisory: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/security-center/advi... CVE-2018-3628 - "Buffer overflow in HTTP handler" Affected processor list (simplified reordered by me to reflect relevance and improve readability): • Core i3/i5/i7, generation 1-8 (that is, all of them) • Xeon E3-1200 v5/v6 • Xeon Scalable • Xeon W • Core 2 Duo vPro, Centrino 2 vPro
Wow. The Web really has won. We have HTTP parsing failures in our CPUs .
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Certainly if the lifespan of Intel chips turns out to be much shorter than the marketplace expected (because Intel is unable to provide security updates), that affects the value of Intel products and ought to inform future buying decisions. Whether it is the unfortunate materialization of Spectre-style bugs or the deliberately insecure-by-design ME, Intel's inability to support its products is dismaying.
So, what's AMD doing these days? I'm hesitant to switch to AMD since Intel internal graphics play nicely with Linux. However that kind of doesn't matter if my machine isn't mine.
That said the amdgpu driver is still relatively new and major changes and improvements are still ongoing but overall it's definitely production stable and for dedicated gpus performance is generally very good.
Not trying to sound like a fanboy it's just nice to see someone else push as hard for open source mainlined graphics as Intel has for all these years.
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Do you have any citations that companies are replacing their intel processors every 2 years? That is not inline with what I have seen.
More like 5 years, or even longer, where I work. We have some 7 year old Dell servers that are still chugging along, performing their duties as well as ever.
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Do you have any citations that companies are replacing their intel processors every 2 years? That is not inline with what I have seen.
More like 5 years, or even longer, where I work. We have some 7 year old Dell servers that are still chugging along, performing their duties as well as ever.
The main motivation for upgrade is software support (usually for the OS, driven by Microsoft), or failure rates for the older systems.
And that's for the desktop side. For servers they tend to be taken out of commission when the service they provide is migrated to a whole new platform and the legacy one goes to a better place along with the metal. Servers are more reliable than your regular desktops, they get better support, and most companies don't upgrade running systems.
P.S. I don't know of any enterprise environment where ME is used for managing servers. It's usually ILO, ILOM, DRAC, IMM, RMM. I think ME is mostly for desktops or SOHO, Intel has RMM for servers.