3 ms·
Remember heartbleed... While open cpu is a great idea, it's hard to say that an open cpu would have avoided the meltdown or spectre problem. The meltdown/spect
by d--b 9y ago
Remember heartbleed... While open cpu is a great idea, it's hard to say that an open cpu would have avoided the meltdown or spectre problem.
The meltdown/spectre vulnerability was there not because people didn't pay attention, it's because nobody thought of these optimization features as potential vulnerabilities. And honestly it's hard to blame anyone, these were really smart hacks!
- allemagne 9y agoThe article does mention this: >Finally, even if we end up with entirely open processors, that will not bring an end to vulnerabilities at that level ... Open hardware may give us more confidence in the long term that we can retain control of our systems, but it is certainly not a magic wand that will wave our problems away. The author is arguing more from a freedom/control perspective from what I understand. When it comes to these kinds of vulnerabilities, an open CPU might be easier to patch or easier to disable the affected components of. Apart from that, maybe crowd-sourcing and open-sourcing the eventual fix is faster or better than a private org. That doesn't necessarily seem like something the author is saying, but it seems like a reasonable factor to consider. I can see arguments either way that I'm not really qualified to defend.