[Beowulf] [upgrade strategy] Intel CPU design bug & security flaw - kernel fix imposes performance penalty

[Tim Cutts]

It seems fairly clear to me that any processor which performs speculative execution will be vulnerable to timing attacks of this nature.

I was pointed to a very much simplified but very clear explanation of this in a blog post by Eben Upton (of Raspberry Pi fame):

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/why-raspberry-pi-isnt-vulnerable-to-spectre-or-meltdown/

Well worth reading, and relatively accessible for people who aren’t super-nerds, so a good one to send to friends and family who are interested.

Tim

On 05/01/2018, 19:14, "Beowulf on behalf of Christopher Samuel" <beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org on behalf of chris at csamuel.org> wrote:

    On 06/01/18 03:46, Jonathan Aquilina wrote:
    
    > Chris on a number of articles I read they are saying AMD's are not 
    > affected by this.
    
    That's only 1 of the 3 attacks to my understanding. The Spectre paper says:
    
    # Hardware. We have empirically verified the vulnerability of several
    # Intel processors to Spectre attacks,  including Ivy Bridge, Haswell
    # and Skylake based processors.    We  have  also  verified  the
    # attack’s  applicability to  AMD  Ryzen  CPUs.   Finally,  we  have
    # also  successfully mounted Spectre attacks on several Samsung and
    # Qualcomm processors (which use an ARM architecture) found in popular
    # mobile phones.
    
    All the best,
    Chris
    -- 
      Chris Samuel  :  http://www.csamuel.org/  :  Melbourne, VIC
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