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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

#21

Post by hishnash »

stinos wrote: post #9

"Here's a patch" - "Here's a patch to disable that other patch" - ... What's next? Repeat? Sounds like this could turn into a maintainance nightmare quickly. Also because I've introduced things like that myself in the past, and that was for normal applications and not a kernel or OS. Somewhere, someday, there's usually this one exception for which none of your rules hold true and the thing blows up in your face. Anyw…

Im really wanding they had more than 6months to do these patches and they did not bother testing on a good number of systems. Its not like MS + Intel dont have enough money to buy a few 1000 testing machines and get some testers on it.

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

#23

Post by cbcoutinho »

byte1918 wrote: post #19
mm-vorticesoft wrote: post #5

Linus was right

Aren't we talking about two different things? Linux vs Windows kernel?

OP is probably referencing the 'bullshit patches from Intel' comment from Linus about the patches they were sent, and that Microsoft might have been sent similar obfuscatory patches.

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

#24

Post by pjmlp »

byte1918 wrote: post #19
mm-vorticesoft wrote: post #5

Linus was right

Aren't we talking about two different things? Linux vs Windows kernel?

Given that the patches are CPU micro-code delivered by OS drivers, AFAIK, the actual OS won't make much difference.

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

#26

Post by carlmr »

mehrdadn wrote: post #20
bmon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.” http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1801.2/04628.html

Oh, this is the same issue?

It's the same bug, same company pushing patches, but we don't know if it's the same reason.

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

#27

Post by thg »

chrisper wrote: post #2

Just checked for Updates, but there don't seem to be any?

Just in case you, like me, missed the memo where Microsoft said they'd stop supplying security updates if you have no AV / AV incompatible with the patches installed. The fix to the former is creating the registry entry manually.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4072699/january-3-2...

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

#28

Post by im3w1l »

hishnash wrote: post #21
stinos wrote: post #9

"Here's a patch" - "Here's a patch to disable that other patch" - ... What's next? Repeat? Sounds like this could turn into a maintainance nightmare quickly. Also because I've introduced things like that myself in the past, and that was for normal applications and not a kernel or OS. Somewhere, someday, there's usually this one exception for which none of your rules hold true and the thing blows up in your face. Anyw…

Im really wanding they had more than 6months to do these patches and they did not bother testing on a good number of systems. Its not like MS + Intel dont have enough money to buy a few 1000 testing machines and get some testers on it.

Only reason I can think of is that they didn't immediately realize how much of a headache it would be.

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

#29

Post by thanksgiving »

tjoff wrote: post #18

I lost many hours over this last week. The system was unable to boot and finally a thread on reddit came to the rescue ( https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/7sbihd/howto_f... ). This actually made the system boot but there are some leftovers being installed on first boot that I've been unable to disable that also causes the system to be unable to boot. So now, the machine is running but as soon as it is res…

Speaking of which, why do so many things require reboot to update on Windows?

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

#30

Post by icebraining »

cm2187 wrote: post #16
mm-vorticesoft wrote: post #5

Linus was right

I thought he was angry about the mitigation being disabled by default, not being unstable.

Nah, it was more than that: The patches do things like add the garbage MSR writes to the kernel entry/exit points. That's insane. That says "we're trying to protect the kernel". We already have retpoline there, with less overhead.
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