Clear Linux Rolls Out KPTI Page Isolation & Retpoline Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Clear Linux Rolls Out KPTI Page Isolation & Retpoline Support

Intel's own Clear Linux distribution has now been updated with protection for addressing the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities disclosed last week...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...Retpoline-KPTI

[Xaero_Vincent]

Michael, have you seen any further performance declines after updating Intel CPU Microcode and/or BIOS updates that include mitigations?

One person on another thread posted these benchmarks that show a futher decline when a BIOS update includes new microcode:

https://www.techspot.com/article/155...ows/page3.html

[uid313]

x86 is beginning to feel like a legacy shit architecture. It is vulnerable to this Spectre and Meltdown.
Intel is vulnerable to both. It seems AMD is also vulnerable to one of em to a certain extent.
Beside that Intel have the Intel Management Engine (ME) which is insecure.
AMD have their Platform Security Processor and AMD Secure Process which is their take on Intel ME which is also insecure.

Intel and AMD are incompetent and add stupid insecure things and x86 is proprietary closed source architecture.

[Jumbotron]

Speaking of Intel....their CEO, Brian Krzanich, has the spotlight on him for his "odd" sale of stock and exercising stock options to the tune of $39 Million dollars. Why...you may ask? Well...he sold his stock in November of 2017 but the plans were already in place in October. However he knew of the news of the design flaw in all Intel chips which opens them up to Meltdown in JUNE.

Here's the further rub. The stock he sold was known as unrestricted shares. Basically unemcumbered shares you can do what you like with. But according to Intel itself a CEO has to hold at a minimum 250,000 shares. Krzanich sold ALL HIS UNRESTRICTED SHARES down to the minimum 250,000 shares.

Things that make you go "hmmmmm" !

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-...taggering-flaw

https://www.wsj.com/articles/intel-c...sts-1515407400

[droste]

x86 is beginning to feel like a legacy shit architecture. It is vulnerable to this Spectre and Meltdown.
Intel is vulnerable to both. It seems AMD is also vulnerable to one of em to a certain extent.
Beside that Intel have the Intel Management Engine (ME) which is insecure.
AMD have their Platform Security Processor and AMD Secure Process which is their take on Intel ME which is also insecure.

Intel and AMD are incompetent and add stupid insecure things and x86 is proprietary closed source architecture.

I don't like to defend Intel or any company, but ranting some bullshit without knowing what the problem is, is helping nobody.
I hope you realize that this technique is present in *every* recent CPU architecture (x86, arm, powerpc, ia) that's out there! The legacy stuff is the stuff that's not vulnerable. You would be save with an old pentium 4! And I doubt an open architecture wouldn't have adopted this. This speeds up execution a lot.

[s_j_newbury]

You would be save with an old pentium 4!

Actually, no. The P4 is vulnerable to Meltdown. You'd have to go back to the Pentium-MMX, I believe.

[Jumbotron]

x86 is beginning to feel like a legacy shit architecture. It is vulnerable to this Spectre and Meltdown.
Intel is vulnerable to both. It seems AMD is also vulnerable to one of em to a certain extent.
Beside that Intel have the Intel Management Engine (ME) which is insecure.
AMD have their Platform Security Processor and AMD Secure Process which is their take on Intel ME which is also insecure.

Intel and AMD are incompetent and add stupid insecure things and x86 is proprietary closed source architecture.

Well...there are many examples in real architecture, road construction, manufacturing, etc. that speak to the inevitability of having to ditch it all and start over with a clean sheet design. This is one of the reasons ARM has taken over the mobile, low power space. When the ARM chip was still being design and what the engineers had were breadbox motherboards with big capacitors and their prototype ARM cpu, they found that one night after they left and turned off power the ARM cpu continued to compute on just residual power in the capacitors.

Now Intel comes along decades later and sees ARM eating their lunch in the mobile, low power space and tries to cleave off everything about an x86 Intel chip that makes it high performance just to make it low power. And it was an abysmal failure. Which is why Intel is not completely out of the low powered, mobile space. You can't put lipstick on a pig and think it's anything but a pig.

[Jumbotron]

I don't like to defend Intel or any company, but ranting some bullshit without knowing what the problem is, is helping nobody.
I hope you realize that this technique is present in *every* recent CPU architecture (x86, arm, powerpc, ia) that's out there! The legacy stuff is the stuff that's not vulnerable. You would be save with an old pentium 4! And I doubt an open architecture wouldn't have adopted this. This speeds up execution a lot.

Yet those architecture changes to speed things up are now a threat vector and the changes both software, firmware and architecturally negate a lot of those speed ups. Once again....AMD at least for Meltdown and Ryzen made architecture choices that hurt their performance against Intel but they saw the potential threat vector and decided against doing that just to score higher in perf or for marketing purposes. Intel...well....

[davidbepo]

x86 is beginning to feel like a legacy shit architecture. It is vulnerable to this Spectre and Meltdown.
Intel is vulnerable to both. It seems AMD is also vulnerable to one of em to a certain extent.
Beside that Intel have the Intel Management Engine (ME) which is insecure.
AMD have their Platform Security Processor and AMD Secure Process which is their take on Intel ME which is also insecure.

Intel and AMD are incompetent and add stupid insecure things and x86 is proprietary closed source architecture.

do you realize that every recent apple ARM product is also affected by meltdown, and every recent not ultra crappy cpu is affected by spectre

[unixfan2001]

I don't like to defend Intel or any company, but ranting some bullshit without knowing what the problem is, is helping nobody.
I hope you realize that this technique is present in *every* recent CPU architecture (x86, arm, powerpc, ia) that's out there! The legacy stuff is the stuff that's not vulnerable. You would be save with an old pentium 4! And I doubt an open architecture wouldn't have adopted this. This speeds up execution a lot.

Pretty sure RISC-V would be considered a "recent CPU architecture" and it's not present there.