DragonFlyBSD's Meltdown Fix Causing More Slowdowns Than Linux

[F.Ultra]

eat some sugar and think again. the fix is to fix bug and pcid is to make fix less slow. cpus without bug do not need fix and do not need pcid

No as I already wrote, the PCID instruction where added back in 2010 for other reasons. It could enhance the performance of the fix though which is why you see it mentioned everywhere now. It's main use is to tag entries in the TLB and then there are INVPCID to invalidate entries in the TLB. See for example this post from 2015 about how to use these and what for: http://www.dumais.io/index.php?artic...1e306b3fbe37e7

[F.Ultra]

Economic pressure? The same way the Empire of USA is enforcing everything these days. If they disagree it can go all political. Only contender could be China but I think USA still has too much power for them to blatantly risk it.

That sure kept the Russians from intervening with the US elections. And note that economic pressure could only be applied to a company and not the employees of said company. Pretend now that your employer is telling you "oh we have to put this deliberate security hole in our product since foreign country demands it", exactly how fast would you go to the press with an anonymous tip or contact your national security agency (which would be obliged of you since your employer now are under foreign influence).

[Almindor]

That sure kept the Russians from intervening with the US elections. And note that economic pressure could only be applied to a company and not the employees of said company. Pretend now that your employer is telling you "oh we have to put this deliberate security hole in our product since foreign country demands it", exactly how fast would you go to the press with an anonymous tip or contact your national security agency (which would be obliged of you since your employer now are under foreign influence).

You're confusing economic pressure per company with global empire politics.

Let me give you an example. In my country (Slovakia) we had a post-socialist steelworks plant that went on "privatization". The contenders were U.S. Steel, some italian company and IIRC a Czech company.

This was before we joined the EU. The Americans made it clear that if U.S. steel doesn't "win", our little 5M country would be slapped with some nice problems on the political level that could pretty much prevent EU entry.

It's standard Empire control policy. Romans did it, and nowadays the "ruling empire" that is USA does it. When it comes to things like Russia influencing things that's spy-related, out of scope for this. The powers always fiddle in each others' baskets (and us little guys get the pain, e.g. Ukraine)

[F.Ultra]

You're confusing economic pressure per company with global empire politics.

Let me give you an example. In my country (Slovakia) we had a post-socialist steelworks plant that went on "privatization". The contenders were U.S. Steel, some italian company and IIRC a Czech company.

This was before we joined the EU. The Americans made it clear that if U.S. steel doesn't "win", our little 5M country would be slapped with some nice problems on the political level that could pretty much prevent EU entry.

It's standard Empire control policy. Romans did it, and nowadays the "ruling empire" that is USA does it. When it comes to things like Russia influencing things that's spy-related, out of scope for this. The powers always fiddle in each others' baskets (and us little guys get the pain, e.g. Ukraine)

Doesn't matter one bit as I've tried to explain over and over. Yes a company such as Intel or ARM might be put into some economic/political pressure to do certain things but the employees of that company will not be happy to comply. Combine that with companies the size of 100k employees each and you will see at least one disgruntled employee to spill the beans.

This is what happened to the NSA. Before 9/11 they where aprox 7k people, and probably many of them sought employment there due to "a calling". During this era it was unthinkable to hear about a whistle-blower and they where labelled as No Such Agency due to the extreme secrecy that they enjoyed. Post 9/11 they expanded to around 30k people of which the vast majority where outsourced from external private companies and the extreme secrecy went out the door.

This is why you can see in the leaked documentation that they caught Cisco hardware in-flight (since they would not trust Cisco to keep silent) and why they secretly tapped the Internet connections at Google instead of trying to apply pressure to Google to comply (since they would not trust Google to keep silent).

I'm quite sure that the CEO of Intel/Cisco/Google/Amazon/Microsoft and so on would be happy to make a deal with the NSA but the "problem" lies with the engineers at said companies.

[Almindor]

Doesn't matter one bit as I've tried to explain over and over. Yes a company such as Intel or ARM might be put into some economic/political pressure to do certain things but the employees of that company will not be happy to comply. Combine that with companies the size of 100k employees each and you will see at least one disgruntled employee to spill the beans.

This is what happened to the NSA. Before 9/11 they where aprox 7k people, and probably many of them sought employment there due to "a calling". During this era it was unthinkable to hear about a whistle-blower and they where labelled as No Such Agency due to the extreme secrecy that they enjoyed. Post 9/11 they expanded to around 30k people of which the vast majority where outsourced from external private companies and the extreme secrecy went out the door.

This is why you can see in the leaked documentation that they caught Cisco hardware in-flight (since they would not trust Cisco to keep silent) and why they secretly tapped the Internet connections at Google instead of trying to apply pressure to Google to comply (since they would not trust Google to keep silent).

I'm quite sure that the CEO of Intel/Cisco/Google/Amazon/Microsoft and so on would be happy to make a deal with the NSA but the "problem" lies with the engineers at said companies.

You're putting too much stock in ordinary Joes. They mostly care about the paycheck. Also don't forget that them whistleblowing this might actually be illegal and cause them to serve jail time (especially in the U.S.). If nothing more they'd be breaking NDAs, possibly something even more dangerous.

Now why would a Joe go to all that trouble if he has a nice cushiony job? Also, most engineers won't know squat. They'll get a black box and the job will be to "put it in" and make a nice interface for it. The internals will be outsourced just like AMD's PSP.

[F.Ultra]

You're putting too much stock in ordinary Joes. They mostly care about the paycheck. Also don't forget that them whistleblowing this might actually be illegal and cause them to serve jail time (especially in the U.S.). If nothing more they'd be breaking NDAs, possibly something even more dangerous.

Now why would a Joe go to all that trouble if he has a nice cushiony job? Also, most engineers won't know squat. They'll get a black box and the job will be to "put it in" and make a nice interface for it. The internals will be outsourced just like AMD's PSP.

Get a black box and ordinary Joes? I think that you grossly underestimate the complexity of creating a modern CPU.

[Almindor]

Get a black box and ordinary Joes? I think that you grossly underestimate the complexity of creating a modern CPU.

No I'm not. Both intel ME and AMD PSP are "plugins". They provide a core boot functionality and some other crap on top but they're basically out of the main CPU's way. They don't integrate into ALU or anything on that level it's all just interfaced. Heck they're both different architectures.

There's no reason why the Intel or AMD engineers would need to "see" into them.

[F.Ultra]

No I'm not. Both intel ME and AMD PSP are "plugins". They provide a core boot functionality and some other crap on top but they're basically out of the main CPU's way. They don't integrate into ALU or anything on that level it's all just interfaced. Heck they're both different architectures.

There's no reason why the Intel or AMD engineers would need to "see" into them.

Yeah but this topic is not about those, it's about of out of order execution and speculative branching. Intel ME and AMD PSP have nothing to do with Meltdown and Spectre, and btw neither are NSA backdoors either, they are simply Intel and AMDs response to requests from IT departments in companies that want to perform remote administration of desktops like how they do with BMCs on servers.