[LAU] Major CPU bugs - Was: Christmas present for self.

Will Godfrey willgodfrey at musically.me.uk
Thu Jan 4 15:09:22 UTC 2018


On Thu, 4 Jan 2018 10:17:54 +0100
Jeremy Jongepier <jeremy at autostatic.com> wrote:

>On 12/31/2017 05:51 PM, Will Godfrey wrote:
>> On Sat, 30 Dec 2017 18:05:46 +0100
>> Thomas Poulsen <thomas at lha66.dk> wrote:
>> 
>>> On Wed, 13 Dec 2017, Will Godfrey wrote:
>>>
>>>> /I'm thinking of getting a new 'pooter for music, and also thinking of   
>>> making />/it one of the new Ryzen ones. I don't think there is much point in going 
>>> for />/more than quad core. The 1500X looks like a good bet 3.5 to 3.7G, and not />/overly expensive. /What did you end up buying?
>>>
>>> Happy New Year!
>>> Thomas
>> 
>> I still don't have it yet!
>> It will be built to order during January. Definitely will be a Ryzen. Soundcard
>> etc. yet to be finalised - depending on piggy bank contents :)
>> 
>
>I wonder how much impact the KAISER patches to mitigate Meltdown will
>have on Intel CPU's in a Linux audio context. If those patches have a
>significant impact I'd surely go for AMD. And performance impact aside,
>the way Intel tries to find its way out of this mess doesn't really
>deserve a prize....
>
>Best,
>
>Jeremy
>

The people that seem to be most up-to-date on this are The Register
https://www.theregister.co.uk/

They've been going at this like a dog with a bone since Tuesday. On one of
their topics on the subject they include links to the *finally* released
official documentations.
They also have a hillarious 'translation' of Intel's official response :)

In brief, there are three issues that have surfaced about the same time. The
most serious one is Intel specific, and enabled direct access to kernel memory
space - passwords etc. patches are being distrubuted which will cause
slowdowns on heavy I/O work - so probably won't affect us much.

The other two are variations of a different issues and apear across all
processor types. This enables access to a different user space's memory. It is
not easy to exploit, and there is no known fix, although it seems better
software security will (eventually) resolve it.

As usual, there is no problem while you are off-line, and personally, my DAW
only ever goes on-line when I want to update something.

-- 
Will J Godfrey
http://www.musically.me.uk
Say you have a poem and I have a tune.
Exchange them and we can both have a poem, a tune, and a song.


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