Disable SMT/Hyperthreading in all Intel BIOSes

Re:Disable SMT/Hyperthreading in all Intel BIOSes by Aardwolf on Thursday August 23, 2018 @03:29PM (#17829955)

Is it a feasible solution to enable hyperthreading only for threads or forks of the same process? Then they can use this ability, but other processes cannot do timing attacks on this process in this core... I think

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Re:Disable SMT/Hyperthreading in all Intel BIOSes by gruez on Thursday August 23, 2018 @04:05PM (#17830293)

>Is it a feasible solution to enable hyperthreading only for threads or forks of the same process?

how does that work on unix systems when processes are all forked from 1 process? even if you get past that issue, how do you prevent less privileged processes that use other security mechanisms (cgroups, pledge, selinux, croot, sandboxing)?

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Re:Disable SMT/Hyperthreading in all Intel BIOSes by Roritharr on Thursday August 23, 2018 @03:31PM (#17829969)

I'm guessing someone at Amazon is looking at this right now.

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Re:Disable SMT/Hyperthreading in all Intel BIOSes by wmf on Thursday August 23, 2018 @03:49PM (#17830167)

I think EC2 has isolated cores (except t1/t2/t3) all along.

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Re:Disable SMT/Hyperthreading in all Intel BIOSes by zedpm on Thursday August 23, 2018 @05:37PM (#17830894)

Note that the recently announced T3 instances all have an even number of vCPUs; I wonder if it's related to this issue.

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Re:Disable SMT/Hyperthreading in all Intel BIOSes by tinus_hn on Friday August 24, 2018 @02:54AM (#17833249)

You could allow processes that have ptrace rights on each other to run simultaneously which would cover most issues, but you’d still run into trouble with JavaScript engines running untrusted code.

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