Spoiler Alert

[Garrett Wollman]

<<On Wed, 06 Mar 2019 05:32:56 -0800, Cy Schubert <Cy.Schubert at cschubert.com> said:

> In message <2c3f9748-a17f-3778-9eaa-99087f33d0e3 at FreeBSD.org>, Lev 
> Serebryakov
> writes:
>> On 05.03.2019 22:55, Shawn Webb wrote:
>> 
>> >> This came over my phone's news feed. Another example that Colin Perciv=
>> al was right when he wrote his paper on exploiting cache for fun and prof=
>> it many years ago.
>> >=20
>> > Weird machines are weird.
>> Not-weird machines are dead-slow :-(

> Picking a random email in this thread to reply.

> The problem is that there are so many of these Spectre class of 
> exploits that we collectively roll our eyes. Yet another one is not 
> news any more.

And that's likely the way it's going to be, absent some major new
discovery or a complete revolution in the way we program computers
(which probably puts FreeBSD out of a job).

I actually attended a very interesting talk by John Hennessey today in
which he discussed (at a very high level) one idea for where this
goes, and it's very definitely in the mode of completely different
programming models combined with completely different hardware
designs.  One big part of this is that more compute hardware is going
the way of GPUs, where the only supported interface is provided by a
blob of proprietary software so the hardware vendor is much more free
to change the implementation without maintaining hardware-level (or
even ISA-level) compatibility.  And a lot more hardware explicit
fetch/store to different levels of the memory hierarchy.

-GAWollman