Linus Torvalds reply about Meltdown and Spectre. Post: 303011891

Sponsored Content

The Lounge War Stories Linus Torvalds reply about Meltdown and Spectre. Post 303011891 by wisecracker on Thursday 25th of January 2018 05:34:25 AM

01-25-2018

Registered User

Quote:

Originally Posted by dodona

.. for a only hypothetical problem.

Perhaps, perhaps not; a hardware design problem that goes back decades just to get performance figures to sell their CPUs is more than bad to say the least - especially when the manufacturers knew about it.
Also, it can't be that hypothetical if it has been proven to work. It is the big/gigantic sytems that will be affected by these patches not so much the piffling little stuff like my MacBook Pro. I can handle a performance hit knowing about it now but can the big guns? <- Rhetorical!

But unless one has experience of writing kernels and OSes then one can't possibly know how difficult it is to create patches, (that will inherently give a performance hit just to _correct_ a deliberate manufacturing fault for profit), that will not slow things down too much.

wisecracker

View Public Profile for wisecracker

Find all posts by wisecracker

5 More Discussions You Might Find Interesting

1. Filesystems, Disks and Memory

What the best HD format for Unix & Linus

Hello people, Im just about to install linux and unix but would like to know what the best Partition type format is for both of them. Can anyone tell me Thankyou in advanced

2. Filesystems, Disks and Memory

hard disk meltdown

I had an issue with a second hard disk in my machine. I have a sparc station running solaris 7. It was working fine but now it wont mount on boot up and when you try to mount it manually it gives an I/O error. I tried a different disk as a control which was fine. What I want to know is if my...

3. News, Links, Events and Announcements

A Couple of Short Linus Torvalds Videos

This link is to a page that has two short videos that feature Linus Torvalds discussing the Linux kernel. After you watch the first video, scroll down some more to reach the second video.

4. What is on Your Mind?

Meltdown and Spectre CPU bugs

This seems a bit serious: Meltdown, Spectre: The password theft bugs at the heart of Intel CPUs � The Register Vulnerability Note VU#584653 - CPU hardware vulnerable to side-channel attacks Project Zero: Reading privileged memory with a side-channel

5. AIX

AIX 6.1, POWER5 and Spectre/Meltdown

Apologies for this newbie question. We have inherited an IBM p5 520 (9111-520) running AIX 6.1.0.0 which seems to be the base install and no further patches installed. Is this vulnerable to the Spectre/Meltdown threat? Are patches available? Looks like AIX 6.1.0.0 went 'end of support' in...

LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

pommed

POMMED(1)						      General Commands Manual							 POMMED(1)

NAME

       pommed - Apple laptops hotkeys event handler

SYNOPSIS

       pommed [options]

DESCRIPTION

       This manual page documents briefly the pommed daemon.

       pommed is a daemon handling the hotkeys found on the Apple laptops, like the MacBook Pro, MacBook and PowerBook laptops. These hotkeys con-
       trol, through pommed, the LCD backlight level, the audio volume, the keyboard backlight level (only on  the  MacBook  Pro  and  the  latest
       PowerBook)  and	the CD/DVD drive ejection. Additionally, pommed monitors the ambient light sensors found on the MacBook Pro and the latest
       PowerBook to automatically light up the keyboard backlight when the ambient light level gets too low.

       pommed can optionally support the Apple Remote Control, too (this option is disabled by default and only available for the MacBook Pro  and
       MacBook).

OPTIONS

       pommed accepts the following command-line options.

       -v     Print version information.

       -f     Run in the foreground, printing log messages to stdout.

       -d     Run in the foreground, printing log messages to stdout and debug messages to stderr.

FILES

       /etc/pommed.conf
	      The configuration file for pommed. See the comments in the file for the structure of the file and the available options.

AUTHOR

       pommed was written by Julien BLACHE <jb@jblache.org>.

								    2007-01-09								 POMMED(1)