Response to Meltdown and Spectre

[Valeri Galtsev]

On Sat, February 3, 2018 4:46 pm, Ken Moffat via freebsd-questions wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 03, 2018 at 05:30:10PM -0500, Paul Pathiakis via
> freebsd-questions wrote:
>> http://www.zdnet.com/article/meltdown-spectre-firmware-glitch-intel-warns-of-risk-of-sudden-reboots/
>>
>> The sudden reboots and non-starts have been tracked to the patch.
>>
>>
> Well, I've certainly heard of these microcode versions being blamed
> for sudden reboots, but like Christian I'm using the now-withdrawn
> versions on two machines without issue.  But then I'm applying them
> from linux (I don't trust BIOS updates, even if they are available).

With all due respect, one person saying, it didn't affect me, doesn't
prove it is not disastrous for somebody else. Even if it is one machine
out of thousand that is "bricked" for some time, it is a disaster for
sysadmin who has that machine as a production server (don't think in terms
of home workstation, these are not comparable by any means).

I'm glad Intel withdrew what was potentially dangerous for some users.
Does not excuse then for [thoughtlessly it appears] implementation of
"cheating the reality" type of performance improvement tricks ;-(

This is going to be long and painful way (on the end user side for sure)
out of this crap we all are in now.

Just my $0.02.

Valeri

>
> I haven't heard of non-starts, but I suppose that would be down to
> BIOS or EFI updates.
>
> Probably my hardware is different (each microcode blob applies to a
> range of different machines in the same generation, and probably to
> different steppings), and also I'm not using VMs.
>
> ĸen
> --
> Truth, in front of her huge walk-in wardrobe, selected black leather
> boots with stiletto heels for such a barefaced truth.
>                                      - Unseen Academicals
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++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Valeri Galtsev
Sr System Administrator
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
University of Chicago
Phone: 773-702-4247
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