4 ms·
That was faster than I expected.
by magoghm 9y ago
That was faster than I expected.
- hinkley 9y agoIs it? They’ve known about the problem for a while now.
- sambe 9y agoYes. Most reports placed time-to-available-hardware in the low years (a whole dev cycle). Perhaps those were early sensationalist reports (this article would suggest they were!), but it is a surprise if you only read them.
- bri3d 9y agoMost of the long-horizon reports that I read centered around Spectre 1 (intra-process OOB reads by racing bounds check against conditional branch prediction, currently mitigated by lfence), which is still a fundamental-principles issue that would be exceptionally challenging to solve without either substantial performance loss or some form of userland/compilation-level workaround. Intel still haven't indicated a hardware fix for that one. I expect that most mitigations for this will center around improving static analysis tooling and giving the compiler finer-grained control around fencing to reduce performance impact. Variant 2 (branch target injection, retpoline style software mitigation) is the most interesting. There are certainly obvious theoretical hardware mitigation strategies like tagged BTB entries and this is the most interesting hardware fix. To me it's very cool but not particularly surprising that Intel believe they'll have pure-hardware mitigations for that soon. And Meltdown was frankly an Intel mistake that would have been shocking if left unfixed in the next hardware revision.
- BLKNSLVR 9y agoWell, it was the day after the AMD news release, so it's timed pretty well. "Our goal is to offer not only the best performance, but also the best secure performance." Jab!
- qarioz 9y agoWhat a lovely coincidence.