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

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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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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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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