A more accurate title would be that Microsoft disabled the specter mitigation’s due to a flawed Intel update, right? I thought this was all Microsoft’s fault until getting half way through the article.
Thanks. We've edited the title above.
Microsoft disables Spectre mitigations as Intel’s patches cause instability
261–270 of 329 posts
Re: Microsoft disables Spectre mitigations as Intel’s patches cause instability
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ea…
I was responding to your own comment >In a case where one could get some sort of inconsistency because of different library versions, you restart the applications. I am envisioning the same scenario you replied to!
Yes, but for some reason you want a GUI alert to tell you important things, which is a foreign concept to me. What I envision is knowing what is running on your server and updating programs purposefully, with knowledge of how they interact and what problems version inconsistency could cause.
Re: Microsoft disables Spectre mitigations as Intel’s patches cause instability
#263Earlier 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 update Linux (Ubuntu) and, lo and behold, I can't really use any programs until I reboot Which is almost true. In fact, you were unable to use programs that changed runtime dependencies or conflicted with current user sessions, init processes or kernel modules. You can often use other programs, but not ones that in any way touched the ones you upgraded, for one reason or another. If you have to upgrade, say, a co…
> If you have to upgrade a GUI app, or a tool that depends on some bastardized unholy subsystem designed to "secure desktop sessions", that may very well require relinquishing the session and restarting it. If you have to upgrade a tool used by your desktop (and if you have a complex desktop, that is literally thousands of programs), it's the same story, though you may even need to restart your desktop session manager or even your display server.
Thanks, I'm glad at least one person agrees I'm not hallucinating. The vast majority of people here are telling me I'm basically the only one this happens to.
Re: Microsoft disables Spectre mitigations as Intel’s patches cause instability
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Also, FYI, update: apparently I'm not the only person in the world experiencing this [1].
But we are the only 2 people in the world experiencing this, so never mind.
Re: Microsoft disables Spectre mitigations as Intel’s patches cause instability
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
And then yet another developer showed there are way better fixes than what intel proposed [1]. So he was correct after all. [1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/1/23/25
It's almost as if software development isn't an exact science and there are multiple approaches to any given problem.
And that Intel don't have a monopoly on smart software developers. Truly tragic.
Re: Microsoft disables Spectre mitigations as Intel’s patches cause instability
#266I'm pretty sure these patches were responsible for my notebook crashing everytime i hooked it up to our Thunderbolt 3 Dockingstations.
Re: Microsoft disables Spectre mitigations as Intel’s patches cause instability
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
But wait, there's more! https://www.techrepublic.com/article/03175c88-5c9b-4ccd-ac62...
I doubt some the best/most popular players of the USA-tech-industry dream team will get any real punishment at their own soil. Any fines will give a sense of justice to the public but it will just be peanuts.
They aren't going to get fined. There's nothing they can be fined for.
Re: Microsoft disables Spectre mitigations as Intel’s patches cause instability
#268Linus was right
Linus was talking about Linux patches, not these microcode patches. They've been known broken for at least a week
Re: Microsoft disables Spectre mitigations as Intel’s patches cause instability
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bizarre. Customers without Antivirus In cases where customers can’t install or run antivirus software, Microsoft recommends manually setting the registry key as described below in order to receive the January 2018 security updates.
Sounds like Microsoft can't tell the difference between "has AV installed that will break" and "has no AV installed", which makes sense. It's probably infeasible to reliably fingerprint all existing AV software.
> Sounds like Microsoft can't tell the difference between "has AV installed that will break" and "has no AV installed", which makes sense. It's probably infeasible to reliably fingerprint all existing AV software.
For something like this, I think best-effort bad-AV detection would have been best. Seems pretty insane to disable security patching because they can't be 100% certain that you have a compatibly AV.
Re: Microsoft disables Spectre mitigations as Intel’s patches cause instability
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was specking out a new machine for my wife just as all this news broke. At this point, I’m obviously going AMD. I mean, I’m not putting Intel out of business, but I have a -choice-.
Meltdown and Spectre exploits are rooted in the nature of current CPU design. If you want to be safe, go build a RISC-V computer.
I don't think that's true. Meltdown and Spectre are sub-ISA issues, so you could have a RISC-V implementation with them if it handled caching and speculation similarly.