Intel deprecates SGX on Core series processors • Hacker News Board

Re: Intel deprecates SGX on Core series processors

#51

Post by jcranmer » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 4:30 AM UTC

dataflow wrote: post #19

The more interesting thing to me than SGX is that all of TSX-NI is deprecated? Not just HLE, but RTM too? Meaning there'll be no more software transactional memory at all?! Anyone able to shed any light on why they're doing this? Is it just security or is it just not worth it even regardless of that? Is there a chance they'll reintroduce it in some form, perhaps in other processor series?

Not a hardware architect, but my spitballing as a compiler writer:

Transactional memory is one of those things that constantly sounds like it's a good idea in theory, but it doesn't live up to those ideas in practice. One of the issues with hardware transactional memory is the challenge of spurious aborts or otherwise running up against hardware limits as to how big transactions can be. Another (as far as I'm aware) unsolved issue is defining a memory model that supports both transactional memory and the modern C/C++ memory model. I also don't think there's a lot of practical benefits--you can make it quite far with existing parallelism libraries that expose something vaguely task-based or fork-join, such as OpenMP or STL's parallel executors, and there's relatively little need for algorithms where you don't necessarily know if there's going to be contention or not.

Re: Intel deprecates SGX on Core series processors

#52

Post by pjmlp » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 4:31 AM UTC

DSingularity wrote: post #32

pjmlp wrote: post #23

I pity that MPX is gone as well, this makes x86/x64 lose to ARM in hardware memory tagging. While it was buggy, Intel doesn't seem keen in bringing in a replacement.

The approach is fundamentally flawed.

MPX sure, that doesn't prevent bringing a new one, otherwise in a couple of years Intel/AMD will be the only ones left standing without hardware memory tagging support.

Re: Intel deprecates SGX on Core series processors

#53

Post by muznar » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 4:38 AM UTC

I wrote my graduate school thesis on Intel SGX. I was not a good student in grad school, my thesis was not some innovative thing but now it is completely useless.

Edit: There is another comment linking an article from Intel saying SGX is full steam ahead in Xeon. Yay my thesis is not useless!

Re: Intel deprecates SGX on Core series processors

#54

Post by nyanpasu64 » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 4:46 AM UTC

DSingularity wrote: post #31

dataflow wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I see, thanks. Makes you wonder why they couldn't fix it instead—sounds like it was a fundamentally difficult problem to solve?

It is a fundamentally difficult problem to solve. On top of that, the costs grow exponentially with core count and processor scaling compounds. If you look back at so many of the intel architectural extensions it is so hard NOT to draw the conclusion that Intel has a POOR understanding of where problems should be solved. They constantly try to solve problems which should be solved in software with hardware. This is w…

Why is Intel wrong for trying to solve software problems in hardware, while ARM/CHERI are celebrated for being ahead in trying to solve memory safety in hardware using pointer upper-bit tagging and now CHERI's provenance metadata (performing fine-grained bounds checks on every single pointer dereference, rather than just following instructions without performing extra work)?

Re: Intel deprecates SGX on Core series processors

#55

Post by monocasa » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 4:50 AM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #52

DSingularity wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The approach is fundamentally flawed.

MPX sure, that doesn't prevent bringing a new one, otherwise in a couple of years Intel/AMD will be the only ones left standing without hardware memory tagging support.

I mean, having played with MPX for use in a JIT, it was slower than just manually bounds checking.

Re: Intel deprecates SGX on Core series processors

#56

Post by femto » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 5:18 AM UTC

Also the note at the bottom of that page: that they are doing away with AVX-512. A bit sad for those who need to squeeze maximum performance out of a CPU. (I gather it lives on in Xeon and Zen 4.)

Re: Intel deprecates SGX on Core series processors

#57

Post by onedognight » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 5:37 AM UTC

SGX is used by Signal’s server[0] to allow an open source trust-Intel / trust-their-hardware, but no one else based private contact discovery.

[0] https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/

Re: Intel deprecates SGX on Core series processors

#58

Post by NavinF » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 5:49 AM UTC

femto wrote: post #56

Also the note at the bottom of that page: that they are doing away with AVX-512. A bit sad for those who need to squeeze maximum performance out of a CPU. (I gather it lives on in Xeon and Zen 4.)

Meh, the few workloads that benefit from AVX-512 would be better off on a GPU.

Also note that it wasn’t well received 2 years ago. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23809335

Re: Intel deprecates SGX on Core series processors

#59

Post by eightysixfour » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 5:53 AM UTC

Uptrenda wrote: post #49

Many moons ago, I wrote a prototype on Azure's 'confidential computing' VMs that demonstrated how a computer could 'prove' to another that it was running certain code using 'attestations.' I thought it was cool as hell, and honestly thought that if such a technology held up you could build many interesting things with it. Potentially, it would have had many use-cases in the DeFi industry, privacy-preserving computati…

It is gone now, but IIRC Microsoft was working on a blockchain for inter-enterprise settlement that ran in the secure enclave. It had extremely high throughput and all of the parties could “trust” that the code running was the same, so they were all following the same rules. Neat concept, they killed it before ever sharing source code.

Re: Intel deprecates SGX on Core series processors

#60

Post by simion314 » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 5:59 AM UTC

judge2020 wrote: post #17

no_time wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious how there is no CSAM scare mongering when it's companies that need private storage of information.

Societally, when some person or org uses a Xeon processor for CSAM distribution, nobody things "man I wish Intel stopped this". However, when it's Apple considering end-to-end encrypted iCloud Photos or iCloud backups, people (read: federal law enforcement) will blame Apple for allowing CSAM to proliferate locked away from law enforcement. edit: as for why this is bad, federal law enforcement have a lot more pull whe…

>However, when it's Apple considering end-to-end encrypted iCloud Photos or iCloud backups

Apple never used the excuse they want to do end to end encryption, did this changed recently? because as far as I know only fanboys used this excuse pulled out of the air. This fanboys always have the most shit excuses like "if Apple let' s you do X what if some child does X while walking and falls in a hole, then Apple will look bad", fanboys really hurt every time their favorite company looks bad in the news see how fast some bad news gets down-voted here on HN(Tesla, MS news too from what I noticed, you start to add a comment and in 1 minute the article is gone from the first page or even flagged)