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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

#321

Post by andrewshadura »

rleigh wrote: post #141
mehrdadn wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, OK, but if Windows's GUI (or PowerShell, or whatever) crashed or misbehaved upon update, would you be satisfied with "that's win32k/DWM/whatever being a poorly implemented mess; everything underneath should be solid"?

No. D-BUS is a travesty and blight upon the Linux desktop, and with systemd, every Linux system. It's the most fragile and nasty IPC system I've encountered. There are several better alternatives implemented by competent people, so there's really no excuse for its many defects.

Roger, I think we both know D-Bus has been rock stable at for the last 7 years, or possibly more, and Simon McVittie, its current maintainer, is a highly skilled and competent engineer.

While I find the situation different with systemd maintainers, whose communication style used to be questionable too often, and their software had some nasty bugs, I must admit that despite those problems they've also built software, which is nevertheless reliable, even though it took them a lot of time to come there.

This, honestly, is the most disappointing statement I read from you in the recent couple of years. And I'm saying this as a person who used to respect you a lot. I find your lack of respect together with the willingness to spread lies like this quite appalling.

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

#322

Post by javajosh »

bmer wrote: post #273
javajosh wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will be true until something uses Meltdown in the wild to cause massive damage. When a digital superflu comes, businesses and individuals will be faced with a choice: continue to use Intel and be vulnerable to a flu that is literally wiping out businesses, exchanges, hospitals, etc or replace ALL of their hardware with AMD. Interestingly, I think AMD has a lot of motive to create such a superflu, or at least enc…

If AMD were proved to have been involved in the creation of such malware, to what extent could they be litigated against?

Well, it would be highly illegal (and immoral) to create such a program, regardless of who did it.

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

#323

Post by Slansitartop »

anonymfus wrote: post #288
Slansitartop wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Incompatibility here means unbootable state.

But it also means that people with perfectly acceptable configurations are left in an insecure state, without an unexpected magic incantation (a registry hack) that most probably will never know about.

Disabling security patches is not acceptable in current year without A LOT of nasty and annoying warnings.

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

#324

Post by code_duck »

ksk wrote: post #289
code_duck wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're the one proposing the enumeration of affected programs and services and restarting them as a solution!! How is using a GUI a foreign concept? Are you debating the merits of a GUI in 2018? In any case, my assumption here is we're trying to help the user and give them an easy way to know what to do, instead of leaving their software in an undefined state.

Great. For one, I was initially confused because I thought you were the author of the post I replied to you. Next, yes. I think we should do that.

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

#325

Post by peterwwillis »

darpa_escapee wrote: post #299
peterwwillis wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I chose Ubuntu because it was more widely supported by 3rd party software vendors and support companies than Debian. But this doesn't matter, because I still ran into hardware and software compatibility issues, and Ubuntu is more up to date than Debian, meaning Debian would have been even more broken by default. I don't know of a single Linux distro that works out of the box with my laptops. Maybe if I bought a $2,00…

> I kind of hate Linux as a desktop now This is unfortunate. I've been using Linux and suffered, for the lack of a better word, with its warts since 2002. There was a period between 2013-2016 where Linux was great as my main operating system. It was more stable than OS X and was much better for development. Is hardware support your main issue with desktop Linux?

No, it's mostly software, but hardware is a big problem.

The software (especially Ubuntu's desktop) is lacking basic features from even 10 years ago. Maybe there's a way to get it to do what it used to do, but I can't figure it out, and I'm not going to research for two days to figure it out. I just live with a lack of functionality until I can replace this thing.

Not only that, but things are more complicated, with more subsystems applying more constraints (in the name of compatibility, or security, or whatever) that I never asked for and that constantly gets in my way. Just trying to control sound output and volume gives me headaches. Trying to get a new piece of software to work requires working out why some shitty subsystem is not letting the software work, even though it is installed correctly. Or whining about security problems. You installed the software, Ubuntu, don't fucking whine to me that there's a SELinux violation when I open my browser!

Hardware is a big problem because modern software requires more and more memory and compute cycles. All of my old, stable laptops can no longer perform the web browsing workloads they used to. Browsers just crash from lack of memory, or churn from too much processing. If you don't use modern browsers, pages just won't load.

Aside from the computing power issue, drivers are garbage. Ignoring the fact that some installers simply don't support the most modern hard disks, and UEFI stupidity, I can't get video to work half the time. When I can, there are artifacts everywhere, and I have to research for three days straight to decipher what mystical combination of graphics driver and firmware and display server and display configuration will give me working graphics. Virtually every new laptop for several years uses hybrid graphics, and you can't opt-out or you get artifacts or crashing. Even my wifi card causes corruption and system crashing, which I can barely control if I turn off all the features of the driver and set it to the lowest speed! Wifi!!! How do you screw that up, seriously?

Modern Linux is just a pain in the ass and I'm way too old to spend my life trying to make it work.

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

#326

Post by Sylos »

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…

No idea, if the OS design plays into this or if it's just a application design convention, but on desktop Linux how it often works (for example with KDE programs) is that if a program has a file open which was moved (including moved to the trash), then the program will pop open a little persistent notification with a button offering to save the content that you still have in the program to the location where the file used to be, effectively allowing you to recover from such mistakes without hindering you from moving/deleting the file.

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

#328

Post by eddieD401 »

534b44a wrote: post #74
mtgx wrote: post #68

Earlier 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.

These won't be the same peanuts from the peanut gallery right? I didn't get many to begin with and if we have to share...

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

#329

Post by krinchan »

michaelmrose wrote: post #311
krinchan wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've long since abandoned "bare metal" Linux in favor of VirtualBox and Windows for my home machine and VirtualBox and macOS on my laptop. Monday's I merge last week's snapshot, take a new one, and run all my updates. Then I do my dev work in my VM. Before I head out on trips, I just ship the entire machine over the network to my MacBook Pro. This is mostly because have you literally ever tried to install any Linux o…

How about just buy stuff that's well supported if you intend to use Linux on it. Been working for me since 2003.

Because I don't buy my laptops. My employer does.
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