Is it time for open processors?

Re:Is it time for open processors? by int0x80 on Friday January 19, 2018 @12:01PM (#16187726)

I really don't think that the speculative execution _implementation_ was in any spec whatsoever.

The fact that it did the protection domain check later in the process was not documented by Intel at all for example.

Having said that, the implementation was (obviously) available for Intel engineers and they didn't spot the problem in 10+ years.

Bugs will happen, especially this kind of bugs that people generally haven't had in mind in the past.

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Re:Is it time for open processors? by em3rgent0rdr on Friday January 19, 2018 @03:47PM (#16189649)

Was is a unintentional bug, or was a deliberate design tradeoff favoring performance over security?

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Re:Is it time for open processors? by int0x80 on Friday January 19, 2018 @05:21PM (#16190414)

I'm assuming the former, but I could be wrong.

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Re:Is it time for open processors? by em3rgent0rdr on Friday January 19, 2018 @07:11PM (#16191128)

The risk of speculative updates to branch predictor and page tables was known to the research community for a while. Even if it was initially an unintentional bug, they had plenty of time to take precautions against it by prohibiting speculative updates.

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