[Info-vax] Intel junk...Kernel-memory-leaking Intel processor design flaw forces Linux, Windows redesign

[Alan Browne]

On 2018-01-04 15:43, DaveFroble wrote:
> chrisv wrote:
>> Designed By India H1B Engineers wrote:
>>
>>> Crucially, these updates to both Linux and Windows will incur a 
>>> performance hit on Intel products. The effects are still being 
>>> benchmarked, however we're looking at a ballpark figure of five to 30 
>>> per cent slow down, depending on the task and the processor model.
>>
>> This is ugly.  Think of the large computing centers, for example
>> Google's data centers.  Suddenly, they will need significantly more
>> CPU time, and thus electricity (and thus carbon), to get the job done?
>>
> 
> And once all the spanners are tossed into the works, which will slow 
> things down, what happens when new CPUs without the issues are 
> available?  Will computers forever be artificially slowed down?
> 
> A whole bunch of someones has seriously dropped the ball on this.  
> Protected memory should be just that, protected, with no way to avoid 
> the protection.

I presume it's an implementation flaw, not a principle-of-design flaw. 
So once addressed, it should result in both proper memory protection and 
increased performance in future cores.  Alas (per the article) this 
can't be addressed with a microcode patch.

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