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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

#221

Post by Momquist »

thanksgiving wrote: post #29
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?

I think a better question would be: why does Windows need multiple successive reboots? Too often my experience can be resumed as: update-reboot-reboot-update continuing-reboot... ad nauseam.

At least on *nix, even when you need a reboot, once is enough.

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

#222

Post by andreiw »

monkmartinez wrote: post #202
speedie wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well , Linus already said perhaps linux should look at the arm folk . Should that happen , well guess what ? From my very small knowledge , 90+% of internet infrastructure runs on linux .

Then ARM "folk" will find the equivalent of Spectre and Meltdown... then the cycle repeats, ad infinitum.

ARM already did.

https://developer.arm.com/support/security-update

The Meltdown/Spectre class of attacks affect certain CPUs. Spectre is a microarchitectural attack on any CPU that does speculation and uses data caches, regardless of architecture.

Arguably, it has been handling Meltdown and Spectre in a much much more humble and transparent way. See https://developer.arm.com/support/security-update/compiler-s... for work they are doing with the compiler communities to address the Variant 1 both on current and future chips.

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

#223

Post by fineng123 »

speedie wrote: post #179
PerusingAround wrote: post #151

I'm amazed on how Intel's stock price still keeps going UP, despite all these problems... just WOW.

I tend to think it's because the folk who trade with stock very well know that these "issues" are actually features. I can also bet that that "grilling" they get from US government is not about the mess the chip flaws are doing , it's about why the "flaws" were publicly announced.

I think we're just in a bull market so people ignore bad news

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

#224

Post by ksk »

Razengan wrote: post #156
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…

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 dif…

I think a general purpose UX should err on the side of "make it difficult for non-technical users to make mistakes"

Renaming/Deleting files in use is one of those things that us nerds like to complain about, but it makes sense when you think of an accountant that has an open spreadsheet and accidentally deletes a folder with that file. For average non-technical people (on any OS) I would say it makes sense to block that file from being deleted.

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

#226

Post by code_duck »

ksk wrote: post #219
code_duck wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, there are many ways to determine that on the command line. As far as a GUI, I couldn’t say as that isn’t how I do system administration.

I’m not sure what scenario you are envisioning. Usually upgrades are handled via the distribution and its package manager, and the maintainers take care of library issues. It’s not like windows where you go all over downloading packages from websites and installing them over each other.

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

#227

Post by rubatuga »

ksk wrote: post #224
Razengan wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dif…

I think a general purpose UX should err on the side of "make it difficult for non-technical users to make mistakes" Renaming/Deleting files in use is one of those things that us nerds like to complain about, but it makes sense when you think of an accountant that has an open spreadsheet and accidentally deletes a folder with that file. For average non-technical people (on any OS) I would say it makes sense to block t…

I see you’ve never actually experienced it? It is actually more intuitive for the average user, as the file name is updated across every application immediately. In fact, you can actually change the file name from the top of the window directly.

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

#228

Post by peoplewindow »

hishnash wrote: post #117
peoplewindow wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Spectre may have appeared later, after Meltdown? Remember the investigations into what's possible were proceeding in parallel with the attempted fixes. Also, CPU design changes take a long time. 6 months may seem a long time from the perspective of HackerNews node.js type hackers, but it's a bit harder to patch decades worth of CPU microcode than a website.

Reading over googles project0 page it reads as if they told AMD about the issues on 2017-06-01 why would they do this if it were meltdown only? also look at the exploit numbering: Variant 1: bounds check bypass (CVE-2017-5753) Variant 2: branch target injection (CVE-2017-5715) Variant 3: rogue data cache load (CVE-2017-5754) according to https://cve.mitre.org/cve/identifiers/ this is sequence based so `Variant 2` was…

I haven't heard of microcode updates that hurt stability before. Presumably the collapse of the embargo caused them to do an accelerated release, skipping their usual long testing cycle.

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

#229

Post by lettergram »

KindOne wrote: post #185
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…

Become a goat farmer. https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4l7kjd/found_a_te...

Fully support lol you can buy land in Colorado pretty cheap.

Had a friend do that... He bought 3 acres, spent a couple years building a cabin in his free time. Then one day just quit and went off to the woods.

Still visit him and he seems pretty happy with it. He doesn't need much income and makes enough money off odd jobs he seems to be doing pretty well.

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

#230

Post by c3534l »

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…

Farming is all mechanized these days. Farmers have to deal with OS and firmware updates on their tractors.
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