10 ms·
Meltdown, aka “Dear Intel, you suck”
- JdeBP 9y agoDuplicate at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16084670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16084670
- baxtr 9y agoThis one has already more upvotes
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ksec 9y agoMay be time for OpenBSD people ( if they have the resources ) to build a CPU from ground up with RISC-V?
- erikj 9y agoSemiconductor fabrication is ridiculously expensive, OpenBSD people can't afford it unless some generous billionaire helps.
- kowdermeister 9y agoJust crowdsource a few billion $ for R&D and we are good to go.
- amelius 9y agoThe first and most important phases of hardware design are a lot like software development. If open source folks can write an OS without much funding, then they can design a CPU.
- jrimbault 9y agoArguably, the most important phase of hardware design is actual production of said design.
- amelius 9y agoI somewhat doubt that is still the case, with modern EDA tools.
- maxerickson 9y agoI think they were maybe making a joke about whether you want to use the chip or not.
- jrimbault 9y agoI think I mostly meant to hint at the [financial] difficulties of producing (and distributing) computer cpus at scale. And that a product which exists only on paper doesn't really exists.
- sannee 9y ago> If open source folks can write an OS without much funding, then they can design a CPU Large open source projects tend to have significant amount of funding - think about Chrome, OpenJDK, the Linux Kernel...
- mtgx 9y agoI don't know if you're joking, but that may not even be an impossible task if say OpenBSD were to create a cryptocurrency for their OS, as long as they tried to make it as legal as possible and try to see it more like a crypto-asset/stock kind of thing than a "digital ponzi scheme." Seems to have worked for the IPFS guys (I'm talking about existing projects that only launched a cryptocurrency later on, rather than from the start). Brave's BAT qualifies for that, too.
- hedwall 9y agoYou mean like https://openrisc.io/ https://openrisc.io/ ?
- panic 9y agoThere are already CPUs available that aren't affected by these bugs. The problem is that most people want the fastest CPU for a given price -- and making a new, slow, expensive CPU isn't going to solve that problem.
- sverige 9y agoWhich widely available and affordable CPUs aren't affected by Spectre?
- mnw21cam 9y agoMost of the ARM CPUs are not affected. For instance, the Raspberry Pi beards are not affected.
- IronBacon 9y agoAnd Atom circa 2012(?). Well, OK not really easily available, but I suppose what you can find on eBay should be affordable...
- LeoNatan25 9y agoAMD CPUs are not affected by Meltdown, but they are affected still by Spectre.
- JdeBP 9y agoYou are mixing up AMD and ARM. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16080002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16080002 .
- sverige 9y agoOpenBSD has struggled at times to pay their power bills. They don't have the resources to branch off into building new hardware from first principles.
- jacquesm 9y agoThat's a matter of finding them funding then, and if there are people that I would think are capable of pulling something like that off it would be them. All of this assumes that they are willing of course, and it would be rude to assume they are without asking them.
- hanniabu 9y agoHopefully there are some tech savvy new crypto millionaires that are willing to help contribute to worthy projects such as this.
- akerro 9y agoYea, why don't you start?
- raverbashing 9y agoGiven the dismissiveness and tone of "hw designers are morons, we're the only smart people around here" from some people at OpenBSD, I don't think they know what it actually entails or how hard it is
- shagie 9y agoWhat would that provide? You'd have a processor that exists that would have one (and only one) operating system that can run on it and everyone else (except for some of the 'linux on everything' types) would ignore. This is the sparc and sun or MIPS and Irix all over again... except this time without any viable business model to keep moving forward and progressing on hardware or software. So what if they make their processor that is free from all known processor level bugs. Would that mean dropping support for all the other processors? or would they still need to be aware of the processor bugs that exist in other architectures that they'd still be expected to create patches for? Would they have the resources to fix processor bugs in their own design when they are discovered? My read on this is that it doesn't make any sense for an operating system organization that lacks any financials to try to pursue custom hardware.
- fny 9y agoIs there not some sort of OS embargo consortium that could be created to resolve this?
- blibble 9y agothey previously broke the KRACK embargo (among others): https://lobste.rs/s/dwzplh/krack_attacks_breaking_wpa2#c_pbhnfz https://lobste.rs/s/dwzplh/krack_attacks_breaking_wpa2#c_pbh... it's no surprise they're not high up on the list of important people to tell
- blattimwind 9y agoNo one seems to have told the other BSDs, either.
- kuschku 9y agoFreeBSD was told in December, which is still a realistic timeline.
- JdeBP 9y agoLate December, i.e. a week or so before the cat actually got let out of the bag, and probably around a fortnight's notice until the originally planned coördinated announcement date. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16074531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16074531 That is hardly enough time, considering that it is likely a holiday period for most of the people concerned, to prepare what needed to be prepared. Google and Intel gave themselves six months, in contrast, and they gave Ubuntu since November 2017. I still haven't nailed down how much advanced notice Matthew Dillion, author of DragonFly BSD, was given; although his apparent level of preparedness with patches on 2018-01-05 can be attributed to the fact that he actually talked publicly about the problem in April 2017, months before Google Project Zero secretly reported it to processor manufacturers in June 2017 in the first place. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16084641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16084641
- alsadi 9y agoWhy you single intel on this, ARM and POWER also affected https://www.ibm.com/blogs/psirt/potential-impact-processors-power-family/ https://www.ibm.com/blogs/psirt/potential-impact-processors-...
- roblabla 9y agoEveryone is affected by Spectre, but my understanding is that Meltdown is a particularly powerful "version" of Spectre that only affects Intel CPUs ?
- K0nserv 9y agoHaving just read the Meltdown paper, but not the Spectre paper. My understanding is that yes Meltdown is much easier to exploit and more powerful. I believe Spectre requires the attacker to consistently fool the branch predictor while Meltdown enables reading kernel memory mapped into user space process via access in speculatively executed code and observing the affects on the CPU cache.
- mnw21cam 9y agoSpectre involves finding some code in the kernel that has access to the data, and getting it to access it speculatively before the conditional that tells it not to is evaluated. Meltdown involves crafting some code yourself that speculatively accesses data it does not have access to before the CPU rejects the access due to permissions. In other words, Meltdown involves your code accessing the data, but Spectre involves getting the kernel to do it for you. Spectre is a neat clever side-channel attack that is hard to protect against, while Meltdown is a blundering error in the way the CPU works.
- alsadi 9y agofrom what I understand AMD and ARM are also affected by the toy POC, quote Out-of-order execution is an indispensable performance feature and present in a wide range of modern processors. quote However, for both ARM and AMD, the toy example as described in Section 3 works reliably, indicating that out-of-order execution generally occurs and instructions past illegal memory accesses are also performed end of quote it just need more work to make it work their https://meltdownattack.com/meltdown.pdf https://meltdownattack.com/meltdown.pdf
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- manyoso 9y agoMeanwhile I have seen nothing from QNX or Integrity...
- jacquesm 9y agoI wonder to what extent QNX would be affected. It all depends on whether or not they map their micro kernel into the same address space as the application, for a micro kernel there is absolutely no reason to do that, the only things you might want to re-map are the message buffers and that can be done with some page table trickery.
- dfox 9y agoQNX does map it's kernel onto high end of user VM space. Due to how i386 TLB works (ie. no ASID) doing that is essentially required to get reasonable performance, micro kernel or not.
- cesarb 9y agoIf the kernel has no sensitive state (believable for a microkernel), what matters is whether it maps the physical memory in its kernel space.
- dfox 9y agoQNX 6.5 apparently maps first 256MB of physical memory into kernel space at fixed location. Also I believe that QNX's kernel memory contains region that maps to pages of user space memory of other processes (as part of the message passing mechanism, but I'm not exactly sure that I understand correctly how it actually works).
- jschwartzi 9y agoWhat about on ARM?
- jacquesm 9y ago
- cleeus 9y agogoogle cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jqSuv7U6AjAJ:https://marc.info/%3Fl%3Dopenbsd-tech%26m%3D151521435721902%26w%3D2+&cd=1&hl=de&ct=clnk&gl=de https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jqSuv7...
- StavrosK 9y agoCleaner IPFS link: https://www.eternum.io/ipfs/QmQU1bCPsg7VY5puKqH6wZfAv1ZWBteKTCgHRKzmVGodBV/ https://www.eternum.io/ipfs/QmQU1bCPsg7VY5puKqH6wZfAv1ZWBteK... By the way, here's a short script that will download a (full) page with wget, add it to IPFS (if you have a running daemon) and copy the Eternum link to clipboard: https://www.pastery.net/zxkzkc/ https://www.pastery.net/zxkzkc/
- the_mitsuhiko 9y agoI love how that link just completely times out.
- StavrosK 9y agoWorks just fine for me? Which link?
- QasimK 9y agoThe link [1] that you posted does not load for me either. I get Cloudflare's Error 504 Gateway time-out. [1]: https://www.eternum.io/ipfs/QmQU1bCPsg7VY5puKqH6wZfAv1ZWBteKTCgHRKzmVGodBV/ https://www.eternum.io/ipfs/QmQU1bCPsg7VY5puKqH6wZfAv1ZWBteK...
- StavrosK 9y agoHmm yeah, it's doing that for me now too. I'm afraid the IPFS node is a bit unstable, I've restarted it and hopefully it'll work better, thanks. Any other IPFS node will work just as well, such as https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmQU1bCPsg7VY5puKqH6wZfAv1ZWBteKTCgHRKzmVGodBV/ https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmQU1bCPsg7VY5puKqH6wZfAv1ZWBteKTCgHRKz....
- DougN7 9y agoI don’t understand the Intel hate. It’s not like their engineers are dumb or lazy. This exploit is very hard to imagine before now. And it’s there because chip makers were trying to wring out more performance. It’s unfortunate if anythig.
- dantillberg 9y agoFrom my perspective: I've been singing Intel's praises for the last decade as they regularly (for my own tests/usage) beat out AMD in performance, clock for clock if not dollar for dollar. With this recent news, I feel like part of the reason that Intel has been doing so well is that they have been _cheating_.
- DougN7 9y agoIs it really cheating? What they are doing is well known and published, with one side effect that didn’t get rolled back (which seems more like a bug). At least that’s what I’ve understood from what I’ve read.
- lmm 9y agoImplementing a cool optimization that happens to break your processor's security features is cheating, yes, even if you did it unintentionally, like accidentally taking a performance-enhancing drug.
- mannykannot 9y agoIntent matters, at least to me. This does not seem to be a case like VW's diesel-emissions shenanigans.
- _ph_ 9y agoThe problem still is: one of the units responsible for increasing the processor performance was not working correctly. So the increased performance of the processor was obtained by not working correctly. That qualifies as cheating - if not by intent but then by nature of the design. It remains to be investigated how much of the security implications of their design choices was or could have been known to Intel. The fundamental attack concept was known for many years.
- tomkat0789 9y agoHi I'm a mostly average Linux user just now learning about these hardware vulnerabilities as I'm planning on building a new computer. What new processor should I buy that has the best chance of being safe when all this dust clears? I first posted this question on a thread about Intel ME. Have processors always been this tricky security-wise or are these low level exploits we're finding a recent phenomena?
- m-p-3 9y agoYou could go with AMD which is seemingly immune to Meltdown, but apparently someone already found a security flaw with their PSP (aka their own Intel ME).
- internalfx 9y agoIf you need security and it doesn't need to be fast, use a raspberry pi. No ME, no PSP, no meltdown, and no spectre.
- pritambaral 9y agoThe firmware driving the VC4 on an RPi is non-free and closed, and the VC4 runs with greater privilege than the ARM core, with access to all the RAM. This firmware may not have security bugs like the ME and the PSP have had, and it may not contain a backdoor that we know of, but technically there's nothing stopping it from having one without anyone in the public knowing it. Still, no Meltdown and no Spectre on any RPi
- clarry 9y agoI've seen rumors that new bios/uefi versions have a toggle to disable PSP. So AMD looks like a fair choice if this is true.
- brudgers 9y agoMy opinion is that it doesn't matter which processor you buy because you will have the same important dependencies irregardless. Intel or AMD, you will depend on the expertise of the operating system designers, the chip manufacturer, and the trustworthiness of the code you run. The presence of disclosed vulnerabilities in Intel chips does not reduce the probability of undisclosed or undiscovered vulnerabilities in AMD chips. The number of possible vulnerabilities in AMD chips is a very large number. The number of possible vulnerabilities in Intel chips is a similarly large number. Basically the choice between Intel and AMD in the context of in-chip vulnerabilities comes down to whether one feels better choosing a chip with known vulnerabilities + significant effort to mitigate or a chip without known vulnerabilities and without significant efforts at mitigation. In both cases, unknown vulnerabilities are probably equal. To put it another way, building a computer is largely a consumer process not a technical one. The biggest security risk is software you download and run, not hardware flaws (e.g. rowhammer)
- jmull 9y agoIs it the right time to call out the fundamental wrongness of Intel(/Apple/Microsoft/etc) outrage narratives? I mean I get it: large corporations (1) don't necessarily have my interests at heart; (2) are not able to perfectly execute (on extremely large and complicated) products and systems. um. This is as radical as taking a stand that the sun sets in the west. I like HN because of the promise that people think just a little bit before just typing something that strokes their feelz-good neurons. Yet, here we are on the front page with "In tel suxxx!" (and "Apple suxxx! in the htop thread, etc., etc. etc.) sigh I guess it's inevitable. People just don't like paying for intangible things, so the only way to pay for the internet is clickz/eyeballz. And OUTRGE! clickz/eyeballz are the cheapest and easiest. I know, I know. There was a bug from vendor X that really irked/irks you and it feelz good to express your outrage. I just wish there was just some corner of the internet where this wasn't the dominant trend and I had hoped it was here on HN. Well, at least reddit has extremely cute dog and kitten videos, and some chuckle-memes.
- krapp 9y ago>I just wish there was just some corner of the internet where this wasn't the dominant trend and I had hoped it was here on HN You're not going to find that, because taking the path of least intellectual and emotional resistance is just human nature. There is a positive feedback loop with outrage narratives that feeds people's ego and sense of in-group superiority, where one either feels empowered by agreement, or feels catharsis through disagreement. The only thing HN has over Reddit in that regard is a culture that puts up the pretense ... sometimes.
- grzm 9y ago> "...taking the path of least intellectual and emotional resistance is fundamental to human nature. There is a positive feedback loop..." I agree that both of those appear to be fundamental elements of human psychology. Fortunately, we're also have the ability to counteract this, either individually via self-reflection, or more easily, through feedback from others. We can be aware of these tendencies and work to counteract them. If the community has a common goal to do so, to encourage the "better angels of our nature" as it were, we can do better together than we may find it easy to do on our own. And that doesn't have to be a pretense. It can be an explicit, earnest value.
- loeg 9y ago> Personally, I do find it....amusing? that public announcements were moved up after the issue was deduced from development discussions and commits to a different open source OS project. Aren't we all glad that this was under embargo and strongly believe in the future value of embargoes? This is a bogus criticism. The issue was successfully embargoed for something like six months(!) before being published a week early.