Response to Meltdown and Spectre

[@lbutlr]

On 2018-02-02 (04:18 MST), Paul Pathiakis via freebsd-questions <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> On 02/01/2018 22:14, @lbutlr wrote:
>> On 1 Feb 2018, at 16:04, Adam Vande More amvandemore at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Thu, Feb 1, 2018 at 3:48 PM, @lbutlr <kremels at kreme.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> the trouble is that AMD's behavior has been at least as bad as Intel's, if
>>>> not worse, in regards to Meltdown,
>>>> 
>>> Can you explain what provoked this assertion?
>> First, they violated (not technically, but they made it bloody obvious) the NDA so that the flaw was widely discovered a week early by adding a comment to a meltdown patch that lead every expert int he field straight to the vulnerability: "The AMD microarchitecture does not allow memory references, including speculative references, that access higher privileged data when running in a lesser privileged mode when that access would result in a page fault."
>> 
>> Second, they initially claimed they were would not release any firmware because they were entirely immune, which was untrue.
>> 
>> They were almost immediately proved to be vulnerable to some of the flaws.
>> 
>> Third, while Intel released (and continues to release) detailed technical information, AMD released PR statements.
>> 
>> Honestly, as bad as Intel has looked in the last month, AMD looks worse since they'd behaved like children.
>> 
> This is the exact opposite of what I have seen/read.  What NDA is this?

Really?

>  "A week early"?  Again, this was found out about in June of last year to affect intel architecture.  A flaw that existed for over 10, if not 20 years.  They did not release the information, Google researchers and other independents did....

I included the comment that AMD made in code to mitigate Meltdown that was so obvious that it led multiple teams of people to figure out what the problem was before the planned release of mitigation.

AMD claimed they were immune or nearly immune to Meltdown AND Spectre. This is not true, they are vulnerable to Spectre and eventually admitted it.

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