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I wish Ulrich Drepper (thank you, Mr. Drepper) would update this with a section on Row Hammer and also Spectre and Meltdown. Programmer's need to know about mem

I wish Ulrich Drepper (thank you, Mr. Drepper) would update this with a section on Row Hammer and also Spectre and Meltdown. Programmer's need to know about memory because of these exploits, more so with the latter two in order avoid creating exploitable gadgets. But then I also think that What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic should be updated to include UNUMs. I don't think that will happen either. Also, thank you Mr. Goldberg.

131012 8y ago
Thanks for bringing that up, I came to the comments section to see if some other details were outdated. Any other insights?
- CalChris 8y ago
  Well, I think hardware and software prefetch, speculation is a special form of prefetch, might be revisited. Software prefetch was at best a hopeful technology even in 2007 and is widely avoided today. https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/software_prefetching.html https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/software_prefetching.html Something I don't think either Drepper or Hennessy + Patterson's books get across is memory banks from a programmer's perspective. How cache organization affects a program is explained well but how banks affect said same isn't. Construction yes. Visibility, no.
Retric 8y ago
Row Hammer, Spectre, and Meltdown are hardware design flaws which don’t nessisarily stay meaningful over time. Further, they are completely irrelevant for many developers. The next Mars rover for example is not going to be running untrusted code.
nestorD 8y ago
What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic is great because it makes people aware of problems with the current system. Adding UNUMs would be suggesting the devil you don't know over the devil you know. However, and I can't remember if it is alreaddy in the book, a section on compensated summation / dot product would give strong time tested tools to attack the problem from within the current framework.

131012 8y ago

Thanks for bringing that up, I came to the comments section to see if some other details were outdated. Any other insights?

CalChris 8y ago
Well, I think hardware and software prefetch, speculation is a special form of prefetch, might be revisited. Software prefetch was at best a hopeful technology even in 2007 and is widely avoided today. https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/software_prefetching.html https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/software_prefetching.html Something I don't think either Drepper or Hennessy + Patterson's books get across is memory banks from a programmer's perspective. How cache organization affects a program is explained well but how banks affect said same isn't. Construction yes. Visibility, no.

Retric 8y ago

Row Hammer, Spectre, and Meltdown are hardware design flaws which don’t nessisarily stay meaningful over time. Further, they are completely irrelevant for many developers. The next Mars rover for example is not going to be running untrusted code.

nestorD 8y ago

What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic is great because it makes people aware of problems with the current system. Adding UNUMs would be suggesting the devil you don't know over the devil you know. However, and I can't remember if it is alreaddy in the book, a section on compensated summation / dot product would give strong time tested tools to attack the problem from within the current framework.