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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

#211

Post by phaser »

xigency wrote: post #197
collinmanderson wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a feeling there's going to be a lot of demand for future Intel hardware that's immune to spectre and meltdown. I think it might cause _more_ sales of Intel chips in the future, not fewer.

Regardless of sales, I would think damage to their image would be a concern. Maybe it's not a concern to investors because their "PR nightmare" turned out to be softball for them, and it's been hard to pin anything on Intel when they keep pointing fingers in all directions. I think it's our responsibility as technology literate folks and decision makers to explicitly highlight their failures so that mistakes and poor…

It would be a concern if real competition was allowed in the x86_64 CPU space. Monopolistic patents, in this case, create the opposite incentives

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

#212

Post by watwut »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #190
numbsafari wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The “dude” is also probably working under an insane amount of pressure and being made to feel like he is somehow responsible or at fault for the whole situation. Best not to make it personal from the peanut gallery.

So the person supposedly single-handedly working on this fix doesn't even work for Intel? That strikes me as... Odd?

Where did you got single-handedly from? Of course multiple people cooperate on those patches. That is it was possible for Linus Torwalds to join their discussion, it would all be much less public if only one institution or person worked on it.

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

#213

Post by simooooo »

Valmar wrote: post #191
speedie wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone would have politely installed their "fixes" . This situation shows why linus was swearing .

Exactly. He's very intelligent about how he manages the kernel, which is precisely why it is preferred by a majority of businesses throughout the world, and is the absolute #1 in the supercomputer world, for the top 500: https://www.top500.org/statistics/details/osfam/1

Are you a vegan?

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

#214

Post by simooooo »

cesarb wrote: post #64
Santosh83 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft won't supply updates even if you have no AV installed, including builtin Defender disabled?? I thought stopping updates was only for the case of unpatched AVs that did not set the registry key...

If you have no patched AV, who's going to set the registry key?

Nobody. That's the point.

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

#215

Post by InvisibleCities »

zingmars wrote: post #168

These updates most definitely could've been handled better. I was having a busy week with exams and I get a call about around 10 machines not booting (this was before the announcement). Sure enough, last thing everyone reported was updating. I call the supplier and apparently they have reports of at least 2000 machines (at that moment) that had to be reimaged across the city (from what I could tell, all were older AM…

Trust me, if you don't like the idea of your entire livelihood hinging on weather or not a piece of equipment boots up, farming is NOT the career for you.

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

#216

Post by kuschku »

evmar wrote: post #207
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…

For Chrome we had to go through a lot of extra effort to make updates not break us. http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2011/08/zygote....

Or you could explicitly design the package so that your pre/postinstall scripts ensure that you install to a separate directory, and rename-replace the old directory, so you can’t get half-finished updates.

Regarding the rest, if your code has incompatible API breaks between two patch or minor version changes, you’ll need to rethink your development model.

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

#217

Post by ksk »

riskable wrote: post #171
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 "…

> I don't know about you, 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. Sometimes the window rendering gets messed up, sometimes I get random error pop-ups, sometimes stuff just doesn't run. This is less of an issue with Linux, per se, and more to do with proprietary video drivers . I have multiple systems in my home with v…

>This is less of an issue with Linux, per se, and more to do with proprietary video drivers.

Actually, it IS a problem with Linux. I don't get this behavior on my Windows or OSX machines where NVIDIA has been reliably (modulo obvious caveats) shipping "evil proprietary" drivers for a decade.

Linux is great, but it doesn't need to be coddled.

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

#218

Post by avtar »

mosselman wrote: post #112

So what can I do for my next self-built pc? Get some AMD equipment, or is that not enough?

I'm eyeing Threadripper for my next build but beyond that I'm going to choose a motherboard vendor based on the level of support they offer in this scenario. Some observations that I'm making:

* How promptly did they address the issue via official channels, i.e. did they leave users in the dark as they appealed to vendors in their forums (hint: most of them seem to have gone down this route) or did they share updates directly on their official sites, social media accounts, etc.

* Did they provide some estimates as to when users could expect patches?

* How much of their product catalogue were they willing to cover with security updates? Since this is a unique security issue with high impact I would have expected them to cover motherboards at least 4-5 years old.

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

#219

Post by ksk »

code_duck wrote: post #204
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…

In a case where one could get some sort of inconsistency because of different library versions, you restart the applications. That’s the point, that this can be handled by restarting the applications and not the entire operating system.

Is there a way to get a nice helpful popup telling me which applications and services to restart?

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

#220

Post by FPGAhacker »

sundarurfriend wrote: post #135
numbsafari wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The “dude” is also probably working under an insane amount of pressure and being made to feel like he is somehow responsible or at fault for the whole situation. Best not to make it personal from the peanut gallery.

> Best not to make it personal from the peanut gallery. That's a very uncharitable interpretation of your parent comment, which was simply pointing out his connection and history with Intel.

Are you sure it is not you that has made the uncharitable interpretation?

I read the peanut gallery comment as an agreement that the guy knows what he’s talking about.

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