Re:Intel CPUs impacted by new PortSmash side-channel vulnera...
by zrm on Friday November 02, 2018 @03:26PM
(#18365953)
It should be possible to do the same thing on anything that supports CPU frequency scaling. Tell the OS that the core the browser is running on should only run at the lowest supported frequency. Or only allow it to run at higher frequency if it hasn't been active for more than 15 of the last 60 seconds.
Re:Intel CPUs impacted by new PortSmash side-channel vulnera...
by amaccuish on Friday November 02, 2018 @09:01PM
(#18368024)
FYI Apple didn't come up with the idea of having differing cores: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_big.LITTLE
Apple's new hardware approach might work well for this: on the A12X chip used by the new iPad Pro, they have 4 high performance cores and 4 low power cores. Let Chrome have a couple low power cores, and that solves a few problems:
1. I get security isolation between Chrome and the rest of my apps. 2. I no longer care very much when poorly written javascript wants to consume 100% of CPU because it's only running on a low power core. 3. My battery life is also better because Chrome can't consume a high power core.