Spectre Variants 3A & 4 Exposed As Latest Speculative Execution Vulnerabilities

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Spectre Variants 3A & 4 Exposed As Latest Speculative Execution Vulnerabilities

Spectre Variants 3A and 4 are now public as the newest speculative execution vulnerabilities affecting many CPUs and with the mitigations also expected to affect performance. Initial Linux kernel patches are available...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Spectre-V3-V4-Vulnerabilities

[xiando]

https://youtu.be/PyCVlipsqg4?t=78

"LEADING LINUX PUBLICATION PHORONIX has published.."

Congratulations Michael. Working almost 24/7 for years on fumes of ad-revenue and community support has finally paid off and you're now The LEADING Linux publication. Officially. Endorsed by tech Jesus Steve himself. Again, congratulations, you've made it.

[TheOne]

I thought about this before and the more vulnerabilities I see it kind of reaffirms my thought that this was planned obsolescence. How can so much freaking cpu vulnerabilities keep appearing which only a person that knows the insides and out of CPU's get disclosed like this. Even normal developers could not easily explode this problems, the people that first discovered this seems like a make up story, smells to bull crap, maybe something even more sinister is at work here...

Edit:
Seems im not the only one who thinks like this - https://www.google.com/search?q=spec...d+obsolescence

[smitty3268]

I thought about this before and the more vulnerabilities I see it kind of reaffirms my thought that this was planned obsolescence. How can so much freaking cpu vulnerabilities keep appearing which only a person that knows the insides and out of CPU's get disclosed like this. Even normal developers could not easily explode this problems, the people that first discovered this seems like a make up story, smells to bull crap, maybe something even more sinister is at work here...

Edit:
Seems im not the only one who thinks like this - https://www.google.com/search?q=spec...d+obsolescence

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Some of these flaws are 15 years old, and entire cpu generations have come and been made obsolete without the flaws being exposed. It's pretty unlikely the entire industry conspired together but then just mutually held off until now all of a sudden. Not to mention that if 1 vendor had avoided them they'd probably be making a killing right now.

Bugs happen, particularly when it's an entirely new class that people aren't accustomed to people thinking about. There's going to continue to be more of these until we get cpus that were designed with this kind of flaw in mind and protect against it.

[spektykles]

There are atleast 4 microcodes with 3A/4 mitigration for Intel floating right now on the Web. 906E9 plat 2A ver 8E, 806E9 plat C0 ver 8E, 406F1 plat EF ver ****2C, 50654 plat B7 ver ****49. All Production grade microcode. Way too soon for that 21/5 deadline. Some early benchmark possible?

[Peter Fodrek]

It seems that these are not part of eight Specre NG (https://www.kitguru.net/components/c...ating-patches/) , Or am I not right?

[Akiko]

I thought about this before and the more vulnerabilities I see it kind of reaffirms my thought that this was planned obsolescence. How can so much freaking cpu vulnerabilities keep appearing which only a person that knows the insides and out of CPU's get disclosed like this. Even normal developers could not easily explode this problems, the people that first discovered this seems like a make up story, smells to bull crap, maybe something even more sinister is at work here...

I wouldn't say that. That are flaws which exists since 1995 where the first CPUs with out-of-order and speculative execution (Pentium Pro, AMD K5, Cyrix 6x86) were produced. The speed gains by these techniques were very promising. But I also remember about papers which warned a lot about side effects. But these were ignored, because all of it was quite theoretical.

[spektykles]

There are some Intel microcodes floating out there patched for 3A/4. Maybe Michael could grab one and a CPU suitable for it and benchmark. If you cant find it then PM me for details.

[L_A_G]

Seems like we're again seeing the logical end result when people simply don't think of security when designing hardware or ignore security concerns when they affect performance. Not exactly ideal, but at least they're now going to have to pay a lot more attention to this kind of thing and be properly aware of the fact that modern computers are not single process systems.

[nanonyme]

That KVM part sounded truly scary. Does that mean that setups where you run an old host with old KVM will behave erratically when combined with a guest operating system that includes the fixes?