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

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 01/05/2018 08:50 AM, Alan Browne wrote:
> 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.
> 

Sounds more like a "principle-of-design" flaw to me.  Hard to
believe all those different companies all made the same mistake
building on a sound design.

bill