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> Thus Chrome’s security model no longer assumes language-enforced confidentiality within a renderer process. So V8 never was and never will be a silver bullet

> Thus Chrome’s security model no longer assumes language-enforced confidentiality within a renderer process. So V8 never was and never will be a silver bullet for running JS/WASM without isolation. I wonder what Edge CDN such as Cloudflare[0] and Flastly[1] are doing to isolate their functions. [0]https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloud-computing-without-containers/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloud-computing-without-containe... [1]https://www.fastly.com/blog/announcing-lucet-fastly-native-webassembly-compiler-runtime https://www.fastly.com/blog/announcing-lucet-fastly-native-w...

0815test 7y ago
Running them on in-order, speculation-free hardware would be quite sufficient, and come with additional benefits in power efficiency. The thing about Spectre or Meltdown is that there's really no case for the sorts of out-of-order cpus that raise these issues, unless you're truly bound by compute or memory bandwidth on some single-threaded task - which will never be the case for typical JS/WASM workloads on the "edge".
- bartread 7y ago
  > which will never be the case for typical JS/WASM workloads on the "edge". Yeah, but it's the atypical workloads that get you, and in every place I've worked there's always been at least the odd atypical workload regardless of system, product, platform, technology, target market (including internal and external).
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  So, small in-order CPUs will be the future of commodity distributed computing after all? I doubt they will resort to that though. They can do other tricks, since they control the infrastructure, like turning on process isolation automatically for suspiciously behaving code.
- phire 7y ago
  > Running them on in-order, speculation-free hardware would be quite sufficient. In-order isn't a magic bullet against Spectre, they still do spectulative execution after predicting branches and they can still be vunerable. ARM have listed at least one of their in-order cores as vunerable. To be free of all speculation you have to go back to the 486, which didn't even have branch prediction. Besides, if you are making custom CPUs there are other options to avoid Spectre that don't require eliminating all spectulative execution.
- wbl 7y ago
  The SPARC Niagra thought that and failed in the marketplace. Single thread performance matters and hyperthreading is not a panacea.
steveklabnik 7y ago
Day 2 at Cloudflare here. I haven't fully ingested this paper, and I'm still getting caught up on all the details of things, but https://www.infoq.com/presentations/cloudflare-v8 https://www.infoq.com/presentations/cloudflare-v8 talks a bit about this. I gotta run right now so that's all I can say at the moment.

0815test 7y ago

Running them on in-order, speculation-free hardware would be quite sufficient, and come with additional benefits in power efficiency. The thing about Spectre or Meltdown is that there's really no case for the sorts of out-of-order cpus that raise these issues, unless you're truly bound by compute or memory bandwidth on some single-threaded task - which will never be the case for typical JS/WASM workloads on the "edge".

bartread 7y ago
> which will never be the case for typical JS/WASM workloads on the "edge". Yeah, but it's the atypical workloads that get you, and in every place I've worked there's always been at least the odd atypical workload regardless of system, product, platform, technology, target market (including internal and external).
zzzcpan 7y ago
So, small in-order CPUs will be the future of commodity distributed computing after all? I doubt they will resort to that though. They can do other tricks, since they control the infrastructure, like turning on process isolation automatically for suspiciously behaving code.
phire 7y ago
> Running them on in-order, speculation-free hardware would be quite sufficient. In-order isn't a magic bullet against Spectre, they still do spectulative execution after predicting branches and they can still be vunerable. ARM have listed at least one of their in-order cores as vunerable. To be free of all speculation you have to go back to the 486, which didn't even have branch prediction. Besides, if you are making custom CPUs there are other options to avoid Spectre that don't require eliminating all spectulative execution.
wbl 7y ago
The SPARC Niagra thought that and failed in the marketplace. Single thread performance matters and hyperthreading is not a panacea.

steveklabnik 7y ago

Day 2 at Cloudflare here. I haven't fully ingested this paper, and I'm still getting caught up on all the details of things, but https://www.infoq.com/presentations/cloudflare-v8 https://www.infoq.com/presentations/cloudflare-v8 talks a bit about this. I gotta run right now so that's all I can say at the moment.