4 ms·
If it's not fixable in microcode, then yeah, I'd say it's pretty bad. Makes it useless as a cloud machine, if anyone can cause a DOS and take out every other VM
by __david__ 10y ago
If it's not fixable in microcode, then yeah, I'd say it's pretty bad. Makes it useless as a cloud machine, if anyone can cause a DOS and take out every other VM on a host.
For a personal machine, it's probably not terrible if you are using linux or something else where you can compile everything yourself. But running binaries built by someone else would be a crapshoot. I wonder how many games (of the Windows, AAA variety) use these multiply instructions?
There's also not a lot of detail in the article—like if the data has to be specific or just the combination of instructions is enough to crash it.
- zigzigzag 10y agoCloud doesn't have to mean virtualised and shared. There are plenty of operations that run on dedicated hardware.
- bonzini 10y agoFor many cloud vendors, including EC2, "dedicated hardware" just means yours will be the only virtual machine on that computer. But they're still running your image under a hypervisor.
- zigzigzag 10y agoYes but if you're worried about attacks from co-tenants, that's OK (the cloud provider can always access your hardware anyway)
- bonzini 10y agoIt would still be a pain for cloud providers if the tenant can unwillingly DoS the hypervisor. Sure they have watchdogs in place, but it gets more complicated if the DoS can be non-malicious.
- __david__ 10y agoI suspect Amazon (for instance) has far more shared machines than dedicated machines. If something isn't viable for shared machines then a huge section of the market is ripped away. Still seems catastrophic to me.