From what I am reading so far, most end-users will see little to no
impact on their desktops or laptops.
CPU-heavy and memory-heavy usages will see a bigger hit than others.
People running databases or graphics applications (GIMP, Imagemagick,
video editors, etc.) may see performance hits between 5 and 30%. Early
benchmarks on some Microsoft SQL databases are averaging 17-23%.
The worst part is that with everyone's workloads so different, no one
will likely know just how this will impact until the patch is actually
applied.
Thanks,
Rob
On 01/04/2018 03:28 AM, Jim Willeke wrote:
Google’s Project Zero bug hunting team has now published a detailed
description
<https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2018/01/reading-privileged-memory-with-side.html>
of the behind-the-scenes research that’s been going on for the past few
months. It’s both technical and jargon-heavy, but the main takeways are:
In theory, various Intel, AMD and ARM processors have features related
to speculative execution and caching that can be exploited as described
above.
* AMD chips have so far only been exploited when using Linux with a
non-default kernel feature enabled.
* Intel chips have been exploited so that an unprivileged, logged-in
user can read out kernel data slowly but steadily.
* Intel chips have been exploited so that a root user in a guest
virtual machine can read out host kernel data slowly but steadily.
(“Slowly” means that an attacker could suck out on the order of 1000
bytes per second, or approximately 100MBytes per day.)
--
-jim
Jim Willeke
On Wed, Jan 3, 2018 at 10:11 AM, Kory Pounds <kory.pounds@xxxxxxxxx
<mailto:kory.pounds@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
Everyone,
I originally came across this at SlashDot. Take a read of this
article and let us know what you think.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/02/intel_cpu_design_flaw/
<https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/02/intel_cpu_design_flaw/>
Since it involves Intel processors over the past ten years it
supposedly affects both Linux and Windows OS's.
Since it is a kernel problem with the processors, there's not an
actual hardware fix short of replacing the processor. There for
there has to be an OS fix for it as the article states.
I am short of the details, but Windows has to allocate virtual
memory to help deal with this. The article states an OS fix will
slow the PC down 5-30%.
Naturally, I have an Intel quad-core processor for my laptop. I've
updated all my Windows software and such last night.
So what is this realistically going to mean for us? Will this
actually have a negative affect for most of us, or just for
specialized uses?
Thx.
--
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