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

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 01/05/2018 04:04 PM, DaveFroble wrote:
> Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>> 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
>>
> 
> I wonder whether VAX would have these problems?
> 
> :-)
> 
> 

VAX didn't have the capabilities that lead to this problem.
I think Alpha does, however.

bill