Intel hardware bug

[Freddie Cash]

On Fri, Jan 5, 2018 at 11:11 AM, Cy Schubert <Cy.Schubert at cschubert.com>
wrote:

> According to a Red Hat announcement, Power and Series z are also
> vulnerable.
> ​
>

​There's a lot of confusion in the media, press releases, and announcements
due to conflating Spectre and Meltdown.

Meltdown (aka CVE-2017-5754) is the issue that affects virtually all Intel
CPUs and specific ARM Cortex-A CPUs.  This allows read-access to kernel
memory from unprivileged processes (ring 3 apps get read access to ring 0
memory).​  IBM POWER, Oracle Sparc, and AMD Zen are not affected by this
issue as they provide proper separation between kernel memory maps and
userland memory maps; or they aren't OoO architectures that use speculative
execution in this manner.

Spectre (aka CVE-2017-5715 and CVE-2017-5753) is the issue that affects all
CPUs (Intel, AMD, ARM, IBM, Oracle, etc) and allows userland processes to
read memory assigned to other userland processes (but does NOT give access
to kernel memory).

​IOW, POWER and Sparc are vulnerable to Spectre, but not vulnerable to
Meltdown.

-- 
Freddie Cash
fjwcash at gmail.com