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Showing posts from January, 2018

Beyond the Intel Meltdown Bug

The Intel Page Table Bug and the Multithreading Bugs , have spurned many discussions and a lot of complicated hard work is going into mitigating it, but I am not convinced that the software mitigations are sufficient .  The problem will only really be solved once Intel fixes the bungle in their processor microcode (which is currently causing processor crashes causing the bungled Intel fixes to be withdrawn by Dell and HP), or make new silicon. Theo De Raadt seems to agree with me: "Solving these bugs requires new cpu microcode, a coding workaround, *AND* the disabling of SMT / Hyperthreading." The latest OpenBSD news on the mitigation of these bugs is here: http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20180824024934 and you should read this: http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20180815070400  I have written more than one assembler, linker and debugger when I was younger and computers were simpler.  I have found and fixed a bug in an Intel C co