'Kernel memory leaking' Intel processor design flaw forces Linux, Windows

Cheltenham is a good place if you are looking for somewhere to bring up your kids. Before then it’s the last place you would want to live. There’s not a lot happening there.

Maybe the answer is to work for the dots until you are around 30 (when they lose interest in you because of ageism) then move to GCHQ.

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Everybody I have known to have worked for GCHQ left in their 20s.

Don’t forget; the view of the Civil Service is that scientists are on tap, arts graduates or ex military are on top.

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Getting rid of the dust would be a good first step. That and checking the fan, I have seen GPUs where the fan had enough dust stuck to it to reduce the air movement considerably.

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I was already planning to go with Ryzen for my next upgrade when I have the money for it… from the technical details, that’s feeling like an even better idea.

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At the end of the day, this is going to be expensive for the enterprise.

Just replacing any “hardware that will not have firmware updates made available” is a LARGE number.

Plus man-hours replacing, patching, reverting when we find the patch breaks Application X, adding more CPU when the performance hit Application Y sees is too great, is another big number.

And the amount of Bourbon cannot be calculated at this time. But even if I stick with the mid-shelf stuff, I’ll need to see if I can expense it.

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Ha! This should be worth at least a year’s supply of cask-aged Islay single malts.

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There is not enough cask aged Islay malt in the world to begin to address this issue. Given the number of CPUs out there and the number of tasks they are running, you’ll be down to corn ethanol aged for five minutes in a Tetrapak.

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Doesn’t matter how many CPUs are out there - it’s what @Wisconsin_Platt can extort wheedle out of his bosses for the ones he has to deal with. :wink:

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Speaking of F00F…

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Are they hiding a DMRM bug too? Cause when I hear about FOOF, I think of the other half:

https://www.tor.com/2012/07/20/a-tall-tail/

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Thanks for this. I didn’t expect it to help much so I’ve been putting it off for ages but I attacked it with two cans of compressed air and the hoover last night.

It honestly feels like I have upgraded the graphics card. Elite Dangerous is the only game I have tested so far but it’s gone from usually-60-but-sometimes-as-low-as-20 to a rock-solid 60fps. Even bumping up the graphic settings from high to ultra, it’s still entirely playable.

Best $4 I have spent on my PC so far. In fact, it’s the only $4 purchase I have made for it… :thinking:

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I discovered just over a year ago that you can get (or make) PC case dust filters - thin screens that attach to the outsides of the case covering all the vents. That was a must-have for my new PC. They’re great. I can see the dust building up since it’s on the outside instead of the inside, and it’s a lot easier to wipe down a few screens than to clean out the inside of a crowded case.

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Don’t they limit the air flow, though? All in, my PC has seven fans running at once and I’d be wary of anything that potentially increased the temperature, even if only a little…

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Incidentally, the ARM A53 processor is about the last one without speculative execution but is still being used in some designs of mid range Androids. I did a quick check and the Qualcomm 625 and 630 are both all-A53 designs, which means that the latest “BlackBerry”, the Sony XA range and the new Nokia 6 are all immune.
I don’t know about mixed ARM designs. The 810 and 808 are mixed A53 and A57. This causes me to wonder if they would be hard to attack because most of the time they will be using the A53 cores (the A57s got too hot).
The 660 and all 800 series beyond the 810 have speculative execution on all cores.

My guess is that attacks will focus on servers and on Apple and Samsung products because they have the largest volumes and are generally owned by people with more assets worth stealing. If I was tasked with fitting out an enterprise with a phone refresh, at least I could offer people a choice.
In the meantime I’m using an old Chromebook (A53 cores only) for all Internet banking and the like. I know this is overreaction, but my wife refuses to stop using Windows, and she’s had to stop using her debit card online after having it hijacked twice in one year.

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Or when the patch turns out to cause random reboots…

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This has been a hot mess since the get-go.

OMFG

Finally rolling the AV upgrade we needed (never let a crisis go unexploited) after waiting for a Hotfix from the AV Vendor that then wasn’t needed since MS re-released the January patches.

Glad I hadn’t done much on the BIOS patching front except classify the machines into

a) Gonna need a BIOS Upgrade
b) Ain’t no one gonna upgrade shit that old

Since every manufacturer is recalling the current updates waiting for Intel.

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I really like how that Intel article says the reports are of “higher system reboots”. Maybe they meant something different, but it reads as though unanticipated reboots are just a normal thing, it’s just that the frequency went up.

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They slightly impede it, but I suspect much less than a case full of dust. :wink: If you’re interested, the site I got my filters from has a page explaining how to calculate whether they’d impede the airflow enough to cause it to suck dust in through other openings: https://www.demcifilter.com/Performance (I didn’t do that though.)

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So BSOD was a feature, not the result of bugs? And Windows 7 had a failure to reboot problem.

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Dammit, I thought you said BeOS patching. Are there any fixes for R5.1 yet?

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