Re:Avoid speculative indirect calls in kernel
by anfilt on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @08:24PM
(#16067199)
Well he does say patches should written that don't treat all CPUs as crap. AMD had to basically say "Wait a moment! This does not affect our CPUs what are you doing Intel?"
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Re:Avoid speculative indirect calls in kernel
by StavrosK on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @08:27PM
(#16067210)
As far as I understand, one of the two attacks does affect AMD, and it's hard to solve as it relies on normal branch prediction.
Re:Avoid speculative indirect calls in kernel
by anfilt on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @08:30PM
(#16067225)
Well there is spectre, and meltdown. Spectre is much more limited than meltdown. The patch AMD was referring to was for Meltdown.
Spectre at least does not leak ring-0 memory. Sure it means that some application might be able to read/infer memory values of other user-mode process.
Re:Avoid speculative indirect calls in kernel
by mintplant on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @08:53PM
(#16067350)
Spectre is much scarier than Meltdown, from my understanding, because it represents a whole class of strategies that lack a single fix, even at the hardware level.
Re:Avoid speculative indirect calls in kernel
by earenndil on Thursday January 04, 2018 @12:42AM
(#16068316)
My understanding is that it's not a bug of unintended behaviour, but rather a problem with the specification, all behaviour is as intended, but we need to have different behaviour. Which means that basically we need to get a new ISA -- or a new version of an existing one -- and transition everything to it.
Re:Avoid speculative indirect calls in kernel
by doikor on Thursday January 04, 2018 @11:20AM
(#16071513)
Amd claims that two of the three spectre attacks don't work on their hardware and the last one (variant one) is fixable with negligible performance impact.
Re:Avoid speculative indirect calls in kernel
by m_mueller on Thursday January 04, 2018 @11:40AM
(#16071681)
I still don‘t get how variant 1 is fixable with negligible impact. Do we have any details on this as of now?
Re:Avoid speculative indirect calls in kernel
by gbacon on Thursday January 04, 2018 @05:41PM
(#16074790)
A bit of PR spin in Variant 2:
Differences in AMD architecture mean there is a near zero risk of exploitation of this variant. Vulnerability to Variant 2 has not been demonstrated on AMD processors to date.
Near-zero is not zero.