Re: 32 bit fix? (Was Re: Meltdown – Spectre)

Dave B g8kbvdave at googlemail.com
Wed Jan 10 09:41:31 UTC 2018


Hi Ed.

Understood.   There's "a lot" of FreeBSD based kit out there, running on
32 bit hardware.  A lot of NAS's for one.   (I don’t suppose any of
those commercial "appliances" will ever be updated though.)

But from my understanding, this problem has probably been present since
1995, and maybe even earlier.  There is a paper published somewhere that
documents such issues, dated around 1992!  Awaiting for the SN645 show
notes to be published, for that info.

(Keep an eye on  https://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm )

The conclusion then, was that it was probably not a problem as would be
"too difficult" to manipulate for any gain.

The machines I have, are ex Win'2000 boxes, so are probably affected.  
One of them was web facing.  It's not now!

Best Regards.

Dave B.

(G0WBX)



On 10/01/18 03:29, Ed Maste wrote:
> On 9 January 2018 at 07:23, Dave B via freebsd-questions
> <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org> wrote:
>> When is a patch for i386 (32 bit) versions likely to be available?
>>
>> Regards.
>>
>> Dave B.
>>
>> (I only run non GUI 32 bit instances of FreeBSD, on older hardware, GPSD
>> NTP machines etc.)
> Similar techniques can be applied to i386, but they are a lower
> priority and we don't yet have a timeline. I expect that i386 patches
> will follow after the full set of mitigations have been applied to
> amd64.
>
> Note that if the "older hardware" is old enough it may predate these issues.



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