Microsoft disables Spectre mitigations as Intel’s patches cause instability

Re:Microsoft disables Spectre mitigations as Intel’s patches... by Valmar on Monday January 29, 2018 @08:30AM (#16257347)

Here, on Arch, Firefox updates don't cause me any grief. Only time I've ever need to reboot is after a kernel or DKMS module update.

For systemd updates, I can just reload it. For the likes of core components like bash, and major DE updates, I can just lazily use loginctl to terminate all of my sessions, and start fresh.

I'm not sure why Firefox would be causing instability until you restart (reboot?), though.

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Re:Microsoft disables Spectre mitigations as Intel’s patches... by rlpb on Monday January 29, 2018 @09:43AM (#16257740)

> I'm not sure why Firefox would be causing instability until you restart (reboot?), though.

I get the impression that the UI loads files from disk dynamically, which start mismatching what was already loaded.

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Re:Microsoft disables Spectre mitigations as Intel’s patches... by postingatwork on Monday January 29, 2018 @08:55AM (#16257460)

Firefox with e10s enabled (all current releases) detects version differences between parent process and and a child process started at a later point in time. Until recently it aborted the entire browser when that happened. I think now they have some logic that tries to keep running with the already open processes and abandoning the incompatible child.

Ideally they'd just prefork a template process for children and open fds for everything they need, that way such a detection wouldn't be necessary.

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