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

[Scott Dorsey]

DaveFroble  <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>
>Speculative execution is part of the HW, not software.  It appears the HW 
>doesn't follow it's own rules.  Or, perhaps I don't actually understand the problem?

In the case of one of the two problems, that is definitely the case and it
is very obviously a hardware problem.

In the case of the other problem, it's even worse than that.  It's not just
a hardware implementation problem but a conceptualization problem.  They
didn't just implement a thing wrong in hardware, they implemented the wrong 
thing.  And because it's in hardware it's going to be hard to fix.

Back in the seventies, stuff like this was being discovered all the time and
there were processor ECOs and microcode patches to deal with them.  I 
remember running a Pr1me machine for months with some kind of grant card in
place of the I-cache card because of a consistency bug.  But we thought all
that stuff had been dealt with and that memory protection was a solved problem.
Turns out, maybe not.

Actually, it's kind of cool if you think about it that way.
Maybe someday we'll get capability architectures and never have to worry about
this stuff again.
--scott

-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."