So when will chips with a fix in silicon be available?
Just buy an AMD chip right now.
Intel CEO: Patches will come to 90% of chips in the next week
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Re: Intel CEO: Patches will come to 90% of chips in the next week
#52What I'm worried about is that it will be hard to avoid these security patches when you don't need them. Say you have a non-virtualized, non-shared server that only runs your own trusted code. I don't want to be forced to pay the performance penalty but it might be unavoidable without resorting to maintaining your own linux fork.
Do you trust all of the userland? Is your machine internet connected? Do you have any open ports? Do you run everything as root? If your answers are yes, no, no, and yes than it likely will make no difference. Otherwise (and the last one is just for fun to attempt to show you this is probably not a wise decision) you probably would do better to take this serious.
For private servers that are totally not connected to the internet in any way and don't need to be, run self-developed code on data which is mainly CPU-bound but also need a lot of disk IO for reading files and memory mapping data, I'm pretty certain it'll make a noticeable difference, for no security benefit.
Re: Intel CEO: Patches will come to 90% of chips in the next week
#53I thought they already provided a microcode update?
Latest version on downloadcenter.intel.com is 20171117; no microcode update has been published since Spectre/Meltdown have been disclosed. edit: see below, not true; they haven't published it on their own site but have pushed microcode updates to redhat.
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Re: Intel CEO: Patches will come to 90% of chips in the next week
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, well, let's not break out the champagne yet. According to your link: > The BIOS (or UEFI) updates the CPU microcode during boot, however most of the time either the motherboard vendor won't issue frequent BIOS/UEFI updates, or the user won't install such updates. For these reasons, the system processor is likely to be running with outdated microcode on a vast number of systems. We still need the various manufac…
OS vendors can update the microcode when first booting the OS.
Yes, I was having a poke through dmesg after today's patch to see what my venerable i7 from ~2005 said relating to KPTI. The first line of output is:
[ 0.000000] microcode: CPU0 microcode updated early to revision 0x19, date = 2013-06-21
I think the rest of the cores get updated a bit later in the process.
Re: Intel CEO: Patches will come to 90% of chips in the next week
#55So when will chips with a fix in silicon be available?
Just buy an AMD chip right now.
> Just buy an AMD chip right now.
AMD chips are reportedly susceptible to Spectre, so that's not going to help. From https://meltdownattack.com:
Almost every system is affected by Spectre: Desktops, Laptops, Cloud Servers, as well as Smartphones. More specifically, all modern processors capable of keeping many instructions in flight are potentially vulnerable. In particular, we have verified Spectre on Intel, AMD, and ARM processors.
Re: Intel CEO: Patches will come to 90% of chips in the next week
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Internet-connected computers are more secure now than they ever have been. Just take the standard precautions: update your OS and don't install untrusted apps.
And do not visit untrusted webpages with javascript enabled? And how do you know which pages you can trust?
Even trusted webpages pull in crap from all sorts of places that I don't trust, the way the web is structured is a disaster. My public news provider for instance (http://www.abc.net.au/news/) has all sorts of shit broken when you run ublock or noscript. There "live breaking news feeds" that are rather important may as well be a blank page because it just reposts twitter messages. And they're one of the better sites with no advertising.
Re: Intel CEO: Patches will come to 90% of chips in the next week
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Very disingenuous of Intel tho This crisis has taken Intel, in my mind, from an American behemoth at the vanguard of technology to a sclerotic overgrown mess. Bugs happen, crises happen. When you're a $200 billion company, those mistakes scale deafeningly. The bugs are unfortunate, but not unreasonable. Intel's communication, however, from the first press release to crap like this, has been disingenuous to the poin…
As much as I hate to say it, I think the Intel PR machine is working stunningly. Every geek I speak to will tell you the world's on fire. Every non-geek I speak to responds with "oh, really? if it's such a big problem how come no-one has heard about it? Oh, ok, well there might have been that one headline..." I am infuriated by Intel's response no end, however I'm also somewhat impressed. They seem to have completely…
Is that really good PR? Or just news that hasn't hit the mainstream because they don't understand it or doesn't affect them much.
Re: Intel CEO: Patches will come to 90% of chips in the next week
#58Re: Intel CEO: Patches will come to 90% of chips in the next week
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Internet-connected computers are more secure now than they ever have been. Just take the standard precautions: update your OS and don't install untrusted apps.
And do not visit untrusted webpages with javascript enabled? And how do you know which pages you can trust?
They'll tell you if they're ok. /s
Re: Intel CEO: Patches will come to 90% of chips in the next week
#60What I'm worried about is that it will be hard to avoid these security patches when you don't need them. Say you have a non-virtualized, non-shared server that only runs your own trusted code. I don't want to be forced to pay the performance penalty but it might be unavoidable without resorting to maintaining your own linux fork.
Stuxnet?