421–430 of 567 posts
Is there any real danger for desktop users? We should be allowed to skip this patch if we dont want it, I would rather take the risk than the performance hit.
For desktop users there should not be any noticeable performance degradation. But they are also likely the ones in the most danger, since they execute random code in their web browsers.
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According to this patch comment, AMD x86 chips are not affected: https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/12/27/2
Sure but who is using AMD chips in place of Intel server chips? If company A competes in the widget market against company B and they both built their server infrastructure on Intel then neither company gained an advantage due to a performance degradation in Intel hardware.
Maybe a lot more now?
Intel response https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intel-responds-to-security-r...
I wonder how this will play out since it seems that everyone, apart from Intel, view this issue as a "flaw".
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Presumably, for a certain important class of application, CPU is not used "densely", i.e. continually. Instead it's used intermittently, like a gas rather than a solid... Hence compressibility. Such applications are far from being CPU-bound, in other words.
So a cloud provider would be an example. Compressible similar to a sparse file I guess as well. Thanks this makes sense.
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If they really care about peak performance, I don't believe the PTI patch will affect them. If you can change your system in a way that the power-hungry part does not work on untrusted data, you can not with "nopti" and ignore it. Systems which both need lots of maxed-out CPUs and traffic directly from wild internet are pretty rare. They're unlikely to run on a virtualised systems either.
Systems which both need lots of maxed-out CPUs and traffic directly from wild internet are pretty rare. That's a good description of basically every cloud environment out there, from AWS on down. In other words they are extremely common.
Intel response https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intel-responds-to-security-r...
No, you can just read data you shouldn't be able to.
> Intel is committed to product and customer security and is working closely with many other technology companies, including AMD, ARM Holdings and several operating system vendors, to develop an industry-wide approach to resolve this issue promptly and constructively.
Let's try to drag AMD and ARM into the mud with us.
> However, Intel is making this statement today because of the current inaccurate media reports.
"Fake news!"
Well you can't fault the PR folks for trying to spin it. They had to say something.
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It's a good thing CPU is fairly compressible. Unless you meter it very carefully, you'll see the performance hit and it'll not impact you that much. Very few of my physical boxes are over 70% CPU utilization on a daily average. It's, however, really bad if you sell CPU cycles for a living. You just lost between 5 and 30% of your capacity. If you have a large building, you just lost part of your parking lot to the Int…
There's also latency though :/ it seems that programs that make a lot of syscalls will be affected more than programs that are doing in-process calculations
Kernel ABIs will eventually reflect that and crop up higher level expensive calls that replace groups of currently cheap syscalls (that will become expensive after the fix).
And Intel will profit handsomely from next generation CPUs that'll get an instant up-to-30% performance boost for fixing this bug.
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Obvious hypothesis: first complacency leads to incompetence, then starting to cut corners has catastrophic consequences. The two problems are wonderfully complementary. As other comments suggest, there might be a third stage, completely forgetting how to design and validate chips properly.
Or the system was designed poorly to begin with and now you're stuck with the design for backwards compatibility reasons.
Just built a new Linux workstation the day after Christmas with a 4.2 Ghz i7. In hindsight I should have bought a AMD Ryzen! Glad the computer I built my dad was an AMD.
http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2018-January/09...
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I hope somebody on Twitter has informed Apple about this.
Unless they live in a bubble, I’m sure most people at Apple are already aware of this.