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Microsoft disables Spectre mitigations as Intel’s patches cause instability

securityweek.com

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Re: Microsoft disables Spectre mitigations as Intel’s patches cause instability

#121

Post by rlpb »

mehrdadn wrote: post #113
rlpb wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...but it happens more often than I would like that I update Linux (Ubuntu) and, lo and behold, I can't really use any programs until I reboot... Ubuntu developer here. This doesn't happen to me in practice. Most updates don't cause system instability. I rarely reboot. Firefox is the most noticeable thing. After updating Firefox (usually it's a security update), Firefox often starts misbehaving until restarted. But…

Development release? Currently I'm on 16.04, and I've never been on a development release of anything on Ubuntu. I'm just describing the behavior I usually see in practice (which it seems someone attributed to "D-BUS" [1]). Obviously the logon session doesn't get messed up if all I'm updating is something irrelevant like Firefox, but if I update stuff that would actually affect system components then there's a good c…

All I can say is that, based on everything I know, that's not the current experience of the majority of users, so it doesn't seem fair for you to generalize this to some architectural problem. I don't know if you unknowingly have some edge case setup or what.

Re: Microsoft disables Spectre mitigations as Intel’s patches cause instability

#122

Post by beagle3 »

mehrdadn wrote: post #113
rlpb wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...but it happens more often than I would like that I update Linux (Ubuntu) and, lo and behold, I can't really use any programs until I reboot... Ubuntu developer here. This doesn't happen to me in practice. Most updates don't cause system instability. I rarely reboot. Firefox is the most noticeable thing. After updating Firefox (usually it's a security update), Firefox often starts misbehaving until restarted. But…

Development release? Currently I'm on 16.04, and I've never been on a development release of anything on Ubuntu. I'm just describing the behavior I usually see in practice (which it seems someone attributed to "D-BUS" [1]). Obviously the logon session doesn't get messed up if all I'm updating is something irrelevant like Firefox, but if I update stuff that would actually affect system components then there's a good c…

I have been running Ubuntu since 2004, and except for Firefox which tends to destabilize on update, I’ve observed this twice in 14 years; I update weekly or more often, and reboot every few months (usually on a kernel update I want to take hold)

Re: Microsoft disables Spectre mitigations as Intel’s patches cause instability

#123

Post by tzahola »

mehrdadn wrote: post #37
beagle3 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a very fundamental difference between how Unix and Windows view open files: On Windows, once the file is open, it is that filename that is open; You can't rename or delete it; Therefore, if you want to replace a DLL (or any other file) that is in use, you have to kill any program that uses it before you can do that; And if it's a fundamental library everything uses (USER32.DLL COMCTL.DLL etc), the only effec…

> On Windows, once the file is open, it is that filename that is open; You can't rename or delete it; This is wrong... there's no clear-cut thing like the "file name" or "file stream" that you can specify as "in-use". It depends on the specifics of how the file is opened; often you can rename but not delete files that are open. Some (but AFAIK not all) in-use DLLs are like this. They can be renamed but not deleted. A…

>What I expect it also means is that you'll get inconsistencies when doing inter-process communication, since they'll be using different libraries with potential mismatches.

That's why you should restart those programs that were using the library. You can find this out via `lsof`.

Re: Microsoft disables Spectre mitigations as Intel’s patches cause instability

#124

Post by zolthrowaway »

_asummers wrote: post #119
zolthrowaway wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, and you are right. However, most people aren't making decisions about what types of chips to use in a data center. It would be wonderful if the people in those positions explored non-Intel options. For the average consumer, all we can do is choose which company we buy a CPU from every few years. People buying Ryzen chips incentivizes AMD to keep making chips and stay in the market. Competition is go…

For sure. Like I said, I agree with the spirit, and you can obviously only do things within your own sphere of influence. I'm also planning on doing a Ryzen build for my next PC. I'm just trying to be realistic to say that even thousands of consumers switching won't make a huge dent in their bottom line. B2B is really the only way to influence a company as large as Intel, unfortunately.

You're definitely right. I'm just feeling idealistic this morning :). I hope you enjoy your build and it goes well. I'm getting my 1600 this week.

Re: Microsoft disables Spectre mitigations as Intel’s patches cause instability

#126

Post by Valmar »

rlpb wrote: post #109
mehrdadn wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aaaaaand here comes the Linux defending! OK... > But keep in mind that if your system can't cope with this what you've done there is engineer in unreliability It's weird that you're blaming my operating system's problems on me . "My system" is something a ton of other people wrote, and this is the case for pretty much every user of every OS. I'm not engineering anything into (or out of) my system so I don't get the "…

> ...but it happens more often than I would like that I update Linux (Ubuntu) and, lo and behold, I can't really use any programs until I reboot... Ubuntu developer here. This doesn't happen to me in practice. Most updates don't cause system instability. I rarely reboot. Firefox is the most noticeable thing. After updating Firefox (usually it's a security update), Firefox often starts misbehaving until restarted. But…

Here, on Arch, Firefox updates don't cause me any grief. Only time I've ever need to reboot is after a kernel or DKMS module update.

For systemd updates, I can just reload it. For the likes of core components like bash, and major DE updates, I can just lazily use loginctl to terminate all of my sessions, and start fresh.

I'm not sure why Firefox would be causing instability until you restart (reboot?), though.

Re: Microsoft disables Spectre mitigations as Intel’s patches cause instability

#127

Post by mehrdadn »

tzahola wrote: post #123
mehrdadn wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On Windows, once the file is open, it is that filename that is open; You can't rename or delete it; This is wrong... there's no clear-cut thing like the "file name" or "file stream" that you can specify as "in-use". It depends on the specifics of how the file is opened; often you can rename but not delete files that are open. Some (but AFAIK not all) in-use DLLs are like this. They can be renamed but not deleted. A…

>What I expect it also means is that you'll get inconsistencies when doing inter-process communication, since they'll be using different libraries with potential mismatches. That's why you should restart those programs that were using the library. You can find this out via `lsof`.

Really? Somehow procure a list of all libraries that were updated in a system update, go through each one, find out which program was using it, and kill that program? Every single time I update? You can't be serious.

Re: Microsoft disables Spectre mitigations as Intel’s patches cause instability

#128

Post by Valmar »

majewsky wrote: post #87
pjc50 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I expect it also means is that you'll get inconsistencies when doing inter-process communication, since they'll be using different libraries with potential mismatches. In theory, but Linux systems tend to do very little IPC other than X11, pipelines, and IP-based communication, where the protocols tend to support running with different versions. In practice you can achieve multi-year uptimes with systems until…

How can you ave a multi-year uptime unless you willfully ignore kernel security updates? In this day and age, year-long uptimes are an anti-pattern (if only because you cannot be sure whether your services are actually reboot-safe).

kexec?
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