Re:Ask HN: Is the Mill CPU Vulnerable to Spectre?
by willvarfar on Saturday January 13, 2018 @09:04AM
(#16139643)
It is flawed to 'roll back' changes. Instead, those changes have to have never existed. Otherwise, there is a short window of time when the cache-visible side-effects have happened, and haven't been rolled back yet, and the attacker can see them (due to preemption, due to hyperthreading, due to running in another core etc).
As for the Mill, it has enough differences that these attacks wouldn't work on it. Just the separation between protection and translation, for example, would stop Meltdown in its tracks.