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This is engineering, there's a lot of things that could happen but don't, we don't all run ECC RAM either. The problem is that speculative execution is really g
by SilverBirch 4y ago
This is engineering, there's a lot of things that could happen but don't, we don't all run ECC RAM either. The problem is that speculative execution is really good and if Intel didn't have it they would've been selling worse CPUs. And to be clear, it was about 20 years from the point where people were seriously publishing theories about speculative execution attacks to the point where it was a practical attack.
Think about how much benefit we gained during that time. And even then, anyone running in a trusted environment would rather have the optimization consequences be damned. Do you think HFTs patched their boxes to criple their perfomance? No.
Sure, now we know it's a problem we'll offer solutions for people who really need it. But it'll be a long while before the average person needs to think about this and in the meantime billions of people benefitted from better CPUs.
- goodpoint 4y ago> we don't all run ECC RAM either ...because Intel placed profit above user's needs and choose not to allow ECC on desktops. Similarly, many other things have been made insecure by plain greed.
- gambiting 4y agoThe other way of looking at it is that a huge portion of the market is running non-ECC ram and it hasn't resulted in any measurable reduction of security or stability of operating systems worldwide. So maybe it really isn't necessary for your average user, and manufacturing ECC ram for users who ultimately don't need it would be just a waste(both financial and environmental).
- goodpoint 4y ago> hasn't resulted in any measurable reduction of security or stability of operating systems worldwide Except it did.
- hunterb123 4y agoBy how much?
- goodpoint 4y agoMore than zero.
- hunterb123 4y ago> in any measurable reduction
- int_19h 4y agoHow do we know that it didn't?
- HappyTypist 4y agoHow many consumer OS crashes can be attributed to RAM errors? How many corrupt files, strange bugs, or quirks can be attributed?
- doublepg23 4y agoGoogle researched the topic over 2.5 years last decade and did find a notable amount [1]. "Bitsquatting" has also been seen in the wild in the past decade [2]. [1] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/35162.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitsquatting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitsquatting
- gambiting 4y agoI stand corrected then. Thanks for the links.
- irjustin 4y agoI'll argue the opposing side. Can you imagine how little progress there would be if all CPU/Ram development were a government program?
- goodpoint 4y agoThe same government programs that funded almost all the initial research on semiconductors and early computers for the first 4 decades? The programs who funded the research for telephones, lasers, aeronautics, satellites, CDs, fiber optics, GPS, GSM, LCDs using tax money? I can imagine how little progress there would be if they didn't.
- mike_hock 4y agoThat's why it should be a concept known to all levels of the architecture so any mitigations can be applied topically and don't need to affect anything else.