I'm amazed on how Intel's stock price still keeps going UP, despite all these problems... just WOW.
Microsoft disables Spectre mitigations as Intel’s patches cause instability
151–160 of 329 posts
Re: Microsoft disables Spectre mitigations as Intel’s patches cause instability
#152I'm amazed on how Intel's stock price still keeps going UP, despite all these problems... just WOW.
Spectre affects AMD, too, so there's no competitor to run to... and CERT was saying at one point that only new processors would fully fix it. They're looking at everyone needing to buy a bunch of replacement products, aren't they?
Re: Microsoft disables Spectre mitigations as Intel’s patches cause instability
#153Earlier 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…
This doesn't fully explain why a reboot is not required on Linux. If a *nix operating system updates sysfile1.so and sysfile2.so in the way you describe, then there will be some time where the filename sysfile1.so refers to the new version of that file while sysfile2.so refers to the old version. A program that is started in this brief window will get mixed versions of these libraries. It is unlikely that all combina…
This generally should never happen, Linux distributions don’t wholesale replace shared objects with ABI incompatible versions - soname’s exist to protect against this very issue.
Re: Microsoft disables Spectre mitigations as Intel’s patches cause instability
#154So what can I do for my next self-built pc? Get some AMD equipment, or is that not enough?
Depends on what you are building it for.
Re: Microsoft disables Spectre mitigations as Intel’s patches cause instability
#155I'm amazed on how Intel's stock price still keeps going UP, despite all these problems... just WOW.
The recent jump is because they released a good earnings report.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/26/intc-intel-stock-jumps-to-hi...
Re: Microsoft disables Spectre mitigations as Intel’s patches cause instability
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaking of which, why do so many things require reboot to update on Windows?
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…
Heck, on Windows I couldn't even rename audio/video files when playing them in an app, but I can on macOS, without anything crashing (except some stubborn Windows-logic apps like VLC which will fail to replay something from its playlist that has since been renamed, but at least on macOS it will still allow you to rename or move the files while they're being played.)
It's small details like these that make so much difference in daily convenience.
Re: Microsoft disables Spectre mitigations as Intel’s patches cause instability
#157Earlier 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).
Ksplice or KernelCare
Re: Microsoft disables Spectre mitigations as Intel’s patches cause instability
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, in principle what you've said about the Unix approach here is correct, if you upgrade one half of a system and not the other half and now they're talking different protocols, that might not work. But keep in mind that if your system can't cope with this what you've done there is engineer in unreliability, you've made a system that's deliberately not very robust, unless it's very, very tightly integrated (e.g. tw…
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 "…
It is a common tactic of Linux evangelists to state that they never have the problems you're experiencing and thereby disregard any criticism. You'll probably also get variants of "you're using the wrong distribution".
Re: Microsoft disables Spectre mitigations as Intel’s patches cause instability
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
kexec doesn't keep your services running, it just allows the kernel to act as a bootloader for another kernel.
Re: Microsoft disables Spectre mitigations as Intel’s patches cause instability
#160Earlier 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…
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.
> I'm not sure why Firefox would be causing instability until you restart (reboot?), though.
I get the impression that the UI loads files from disk dynamically, which start mismatching what was already loaded.