Intel making us slow down
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@parody said in Intel making us slow down:
the motherboard manufacturer has already said they're only doing updates for boards currently in warranty.
I hate it with a passion, when hardware that works is no longer supported. (No drivers for my synth keyboard for recent OS, etc.)
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@pjh Makes me want to trademark "A bug" so I can charge $0.50 per say.
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@blakeyrat If yoiu liked @~'s posts yesterday, you'll love today's:
Probably Meltdown/Spectre are just the beginning of a public attempt to use any measurable hardware effects as a programming language from a simple microcontroller.
If that's the case, probably using paging as a measure to leak data will only be one of the weakest ways to gather any data in a system, probably wouldn't really be the fault of the architecture implementation (beyond doing temporary operations that leave measurable traces before making sure that the operation is allowed as when loading pages before making sure that privilege access will be allowed for operands), and probably there will always be ways to determine valuable things and which will become easier as processors become more advanced.
The only task of interest here is dealing with hardware effects as if they were input/output gates to manipulate, and if electronics prove to be always suitable for observing any desired data and effects through manual analysis from software, then the best choice will definitely be to isolate a machine from code designed for that in one way or another, because there would always be a way to measure things electronically through analyzing code.
Things like this will always be usable if privileged malware is installed.
Anyone who thinks they can make heads or tails of that, please let us know, then report to the nearest mental hospital for decontamination.
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@scholrlea - There have been so many ways that information can be gathered. I remember well [1980's] the ability to sit outside a building and using just RF emissions be able to gather significant information from the computer inside the building that had zero outside connectivity (or "wireless networking").
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@thecpuwizard Yeah; that was what led to the idea of TEMPEST around then. But ~ doesn't seem to be making sense about it, he's just voiding his mental bowels on the forum.
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@scholrlea I can't say I actually understand the post per se, but all the talk about gates and side effects reminded me of that artificially-evolved FPGA that used a bunch of theoretically disconnected gates to actually do stuff, via some unknown side channel. The downside was that it only worked in the one physical device it was evolved in.
But let's not confuse the "cache side effects" that can lead to data leaks with actual electromagnetic side effects of data literally affecting signals next to them (like the row hammer attack). They are completely different categories.
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@anonymous234 I recall that one, yes. Wasn't the project meant to develop a compact long-range receiver antenna for a space probe? They never did figure it out, though IIRC it did get used.
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@scholrlea I think you're mixing up NASA's evolved antennas with FPGAs that just differentiate between two audio tones: https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/
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@anonymous234 Ah, OK, you are probably right.
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@atazhaia said in Intel making us slow down:
My computer is affected. Unsure if Intel will bother actually releasing a patch for it, though, as they only have announced CPUs from the past 5 years will get it this far. So, Windows have the patch installed on my computer but don't have it activated because it is lacking hardware support for it. And I still don't want to replace my computer quite yet.
I have an i7-4770k, and Intel doesn't have any updates available for me. They didn't even let me ask them if there were updates until I installed their spyware.
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@scholrlea said in Intel making us slow down:
Anyone who thinks they can make heads or tails of that, please let us know, then report to the nearest mental hospital for decontamination.
I have tried and both
head
andtail
function correctly on that text sample.
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@scholrlea said in Intel making us slow down:
Anyone who thinks they can make heads or tails of that, please let us know
His word salad appears to be contaminated with e. coli.
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@scholrlea Reminds me of a certain Gary Skeete. He occasionally finds a community project, joins its mailing list, and spams it with incoherent rants until he gets banned. Like this:
I thought it was a spambot but he has videos on youtube where he seems to be reading some of these rants on camera while looking like a hobo. Or rather had, looking at his channel now all the old videos are gone and all there is now is a bunch of muscle gain progress updates or whatever the hell.
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@blek Wow, that "article" approaches timecube levels of rambling.
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@blek Maybe his "solution to eternity" is to just keep talking, uninterrupted, so the end of time won't have a chance to get a word in edgewise.
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@blek That's some pretty impressive logorrhea. As for the videos, Terry Davis (of TempleOS fame) does the same, just with more racist/homophobic slurs and anti-government invective - often combining them, with one of his favorites apparently being
hidden for delicate sensibilities and plausible deniability
"glow-in-the-dark CIA nigger faggots".
Charming...
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@pjh
Hey, you know, I was just copy pastaing someone else's per say. I don't generally use such poor gramming, per se.
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@anonymous234 said in Intel making us slow down:
Wow, that "article" approaches timecube levels of rambling.
To me it looks more like randomly generated text like what that "scientific paper" generator produces...
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@izzion said in Intel making us slow down:
@pjh
Hey, you know, I was just copy pastaing someone else's per say. I don't generally use such poor gramming,per sePercy.FTFY
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Linux screaming at the Intel patches:
As it is, the patches are COMPLETE AND UTTER GARBAGE.
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@sockpuppet7 said in Intel making us slow down:
Linux screaming at the Intel patches:
As it is, the patches are COMPLETE AND UTTER GARBAGE.
Did Linus ascend to a higher state of being and become one with the Linux kernel? Wouldn't surprise me.
Also, the Intel patches are garbage? Doesn't surprise me based off all the reports about system instability after updating. At this point I wonder if I should hope that my system is too old for Intel to bother patching it to not risk the random crashing...
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@atazhaia He is angry that Intel proposal is that new chips will be vulnerable to Spectre by default, unless the kernel asks for extra safety. Because the fix will make Intel look bad at the benchmarks.
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@sockpuppet7 Yeah, and I agree fully with Linus here that the patches are complete garbage. Intel fucked up, so they will take the performance hit that the patch causes. Security is not opt-in. Especially not after they have explicitly gone out and said said that they are going to put security first now. Arseholes.
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@atazhaia said in Intel making us slow down:
Security
is notshouldn't be, but all too often is opt-in.FTF the real world, sadly.
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@atazhaia said in Intel making us slow down:
@sockpuppet7 Yeah, and I agree fully with Linus here that the patches are complete garbage. Intel fucked up, so they will take the performance hit that the patch causes. Security is not opt-in. Especially not after they have explicitly gone out and said said that they are going to put security first now. Arseholes.
Maslow's Hierarchy of Code Quality:
- Make it correct
- Make it perform reasonably well
- Make it pretty and easy to understand
By prioritizing performance above correctness, they're violating the hierarchy. So I agree, this is wrong.
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@masonwheeler I disagree. The perfect is not the enemy of the good. A lot of times, having a widely accepted "good enough" system is much better than a perfect system that no one wants to use. Most non-critical systems are not "correct" in any sane meaning of the word. They're just correct enough. There's often a tradeoff not a hierarchy at work here.
This is the same for scientific endeavors (models, theories, etc). None of them are TRUE, but some of them are useful.
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@blakeyrat 6:40 isn't even early.
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You losers and your fancy-for-the-sake-of-being-fancy CPUs.
I've been using a computer without a CPU for years, and I've been fine.
Stop buying into Intel's bullshit that you "need" a CPU.
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@lorne-kates wat
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@benjamin-hall said in Intel making us slow down:
a perfect system that no one wants to use
A lack of desire to use the system is itself an imperfection of the system [or the user ;) ]
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@thecpuwizard I dunno, I can't imagine many people have any desire whatsoever to use tax filing software, but I don't think it's the fault of the software or its users.
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@blek said in Intel making us slow down:
I can't imagine many people have any desire whatsoever to use tax filing software,
Well, lets start with the professional tax preparers - do you think they would prefer to use pure pencil and paper.
Now for the others
Pretty sure those who pay professionals would prefer that software was used....
For those who do it themselves, I don't have a good set of statistics on those who prefer a software package to paper calculations...
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@blek That's what always bugged me about IE renaming "bookmarks" to "favorites". Just because I want to return to a site doesn't mean it's my "favorite" anything at all. It could be a website listing the tax code, for example.
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@blakeyrat said in Intel making us slow down:
@blek That's what always bugged me about IE renaming "bookmarks" to "favorites". Just because I want to return to a site doesn't mean it's my "favorite" anything at all. It could be a website listing the tax code, for example.
It's your favourite site to list the tax code, obviously! :P
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From /r/cpp: the effect of the retpoline mitigation on virtual calls in C++.
int cpp_virtual_function_call(my_class* object) { return object->virtual_function(); }
is without retpolines
cpp_virtual_function_call(my_class*): # @cpp_virtual_function_call(my_class*) mov rax, qword ptr [rdi] jmp qword ptr [rax] # TAILCALL
With retpolines it becomes the following monstrosity instead:
cpp_virtual_function_call(my_class*): # @cpp_virtual_function_call(my_class*) mov rax, qword ptr [rdi] mov r11, qword ptr [rax] jmp __llvm_retpoline_r11 # TAILCALL __llvm_retpoline_r11: # @__llvm_retpoline_r11 call .LBB1_2 .LBB1_1: # Block address taken pause lfence jmp .LBB1_1 .LBB1_2: # Block address taken mov qword ptr [rsp], r11 ret
The horrifying parts are the last two instructions and the
call
. You're callingLBB1_2
(which pushes the return address onto the stack), switching out the return address on the stack to the address of the virtual function call and then returning into that function. Real pretty.
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From bad to worse: Microsoft's fix for Meltdown inadvertently opened up another gaping security hole in Windows 7.
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@dcoder Well, that's just embarrassing. How do you accidentally make the page tables writable? How did that possibly pass security review and how was it not noticed for two months when those fixes were likely to be dissected for performance analysis? I feel like there has to be more to this story but it looks pretty bad on the surface.
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@heterodox Looks pretty bad on all machines, actually. Not just Surface.
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@pie_flavor said in Intel making us slow down:
@heterodox Looks pretty bad on all machines, actually. Not just Surface.
I want to downvote this so much, but I'll have to settle for not upvoting it. What's worse is I thought the same thing while writing it but figured no one else would so I didn't need to correct for ambiguity. :P
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@pie_flavor said in Intel making us slow down:
@heterodox Looks pretty bad on all machines, actually. Not just Surface.
The bad jokes thread is .
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@dcoder something something Windows 10 something tin-foil hat...