Intel PCs to be reduced in speed by up to 30%

Any reaction from the Linux community yet... or do that have some magical immunity from malware?

My new Iphone received today has just updated its software and according to Apple it is now “safe”,whatever that means. One day a couple of years ago I was in my bank when a technician was fixing a cash point, it was housed in a huge polished mahogany cabinet, inside was a desktop PC complete with monitor screen and keyboard, I could see on the monitor screen that the equipment was running on Microsoft Windows, rather worrying to think that there are thousands of Windows powered PCs all connected to the Banks mainframe computer, one can only imagine what havoc could be wrought with a determined cyber attack.

Dave W

No, Linux is not immune because the problem lies in the CPU not the operating system. New kernels are being worked on to overcome the error and will be released soon. New CPU microcode firmware will be installed by a regular update.

There is a lot of talk of a 30% slow down but that is a worst case and most users will notice very little difference. It will only really affect you if you have many tabs open in your browser or are downloading a large torrent file while watching a video or something similar.

Russell

Fortunately Linux's famous resistance to malware is real, not magical!

Red Hat may have been first to deploy fixes rather than Apple not that it matters. Everyone is taking this seriously.

This story may be going to run and run. Digging a little deeper shows signs of mud starting to fly. It seems that the hardware boys were very late informing operating system developers that there was a major problem. Microsoft and all the other developers were bounced into rushing patches out when the news broke; there are concerns that the patches may themselves be buggy. It could get very messy.

When it comes to performance the size of the hit depends on what the computer is doing. There's a good chance a typical PC will only slow down very slightly, say 2%. More serious looks to be the impact on database servers and the like: up to 30%. It's more likely to slow down the Forum at the server end than our browsers. I expect everyone will blame you Neil!

I expect we'll be finding out the truth during the next week or too. Let's hope it's a storm in a teacup rather than the end of Model Engineering as we know it.

Dave

Neil,

I think if you read what the Linux community actually says, you will find that they do not claim, and never have claimed, immunity from malware etc. What they do say, is that Linux is inherantly safer than Windows because a) the small user base means that spammers, thieves etc do not get anything like the quantity of results as they do from Windows; and b) because Linux by default does not allow easy access to the root, it is more difficult for the ne'er do wells to gain access and do severe damage. Although, as I understand it, Windows is catching up with Linux in this respect.

Peter G. Shaw

For anyone interested here are links to the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures database where these things are made public.

CVE-2017-5715

CVE-2017-5753

CVE-2017-5754

I was being mischievous. While there are fewer Linux vulnerabilities, it has its share of viruses, ransomware, trojans etc.

There are already cross-platform viruses, one was spread by Microsoft Office, sorry, OpenOffice.

Neil

Still being mischievous you bad boy! Go sit on the naughty step and think about what you typed.

Linux's share of viruses is less than 0.1%. Also I think it's safe to say that most Linux malware lives in a laboratory and that none has ever done significant damage in the real world. Apple is not quite so safe, but poor old Microsoft is riddled with it. That's just how it is.

Anyone else remember Mellisa? Happy Days.

Dave

From watching the bbc news, you would think the problem just affected Apple products.

As far as I am aware Apple patched there products a few weeks ago apart from Safari.

If they're messing with the chip microcode then things could get awkward

Some OEM vendors allow it, Intel does not in my experience (775 boards)

If you plug a chip into a board without the right microcode for it you can get a dead computer

(Swap the old chip back in and things are fine)

Interesting times ahead

Edited By Ady1 on 06/01/2018 00:49:49

Who do you mean by "they"?

The code in the intel-microcode package is written by Intel. It is undocumented, encrypted, and full of checksums so it would be very difficult for anyone else to play with. BIOS loads the microcode into the CPU following a hard reboot and is used by Intel to fix bugs in the CPU firmware.

Russell

Edited By Russell Eberhardt on 06/01/2018 08:10:16

I think it has already hit my ASUS Lap top as it took 9 hours to download and rebuild Win 10 last night!.

Clive

Russell Eberhardt:

Thank you for further clarifying the relationship between Intel microcode and the BIOS. As I understand it, the latter is written by the motherboard manufacturer - possibly an argument for using an Intel board.

I probably need to re-visit Scott Mueller's excellent book.

More detail on microde updates here. See section 9.1.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/64-ia-32-architectures-software-developer-vol-3a-part-1-manual.html

Russell

Time to sue Intel??

Class action

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/05/intel-class-action-lawsuits-meltdown-spectre-bugs-computer

Russell

Tracy Kidder's 'Soul of a New Machine' is a thoroughly readable book about developing a bleeding edge 32-bit processor circa 1980. As I recall it's good at explaining Microcode.

Dave

.

I guess that's what Brian Krzanich thought.

MichaelG.

The chance of most people being affected by either bug is pretty slim and the press coverage around it is cataclysmic.

The cure is probably worse than the disease in this case - the overhead incurred in large data centres after the fixes are applied - as compared to people browsing the web or watching movies - could use a lot of extra power for the same workload.

With this and the Management Extension stuff last year Intel is having a hard time of it. Not that I feel sorry for them.

If you are running W10 on a computer that has an AMD processor it might be a good idea to avoid updates for now!

**LINK**

http://news.softpedia.com/news/windows-10-cumulative-update-kb4056892-meltdown-spectre-fix-fails-to-install-519238.shtml

Russell

The chance of most people being affected by either bug is pretty slim and the press coverage around it is cataclysmic.

Intruiging to watch society being manipulated by semi truths and wild exaggeration though

I wonder if any flip side commentary will be permitted, I doubt it