<story><title>Meltdown, aka “Dear Intel, you suck”</title><url>https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&amp;m=151521435721902&amp;w=2</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DougN7</author><text>I don’t understand the Intel hate.  It’s not like their engineers are dumb or lazy.  This exploit is very hard to imagine before now.  And it’s there because chip makers were trying to wring out more performance.  It’s unfortunate if anythig.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sverige</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not just OpenBSD.  For example, here&amp;#x27;s an interesting comment from Matt Dillon&amp;#x27;s commit to DragonflyBSD to mitigate Meltdown [1]:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; I should note that we kernel programmers have spent decades trying to reduce system call overheads, so to be sure, we are all pretty pissed off at Intel right now.  Intel&amp;#x27;s press releases have also been HIGHLY DECEPTIVE.  In particular, they are starting to talk up &amp;#x27;microcode updates&amp;#x27;, but those are mitigations for the Spectre bug, not for the Meltdown bug.  Spectre is another bug, far more difficult to exploit than Meltdown, which leaks information from other processes or the kernel based on those other processes or kernel doing speculative reads and executions which are partially managed by the originating user process.  Spectre does NOT involve a protection domain violation like Meltdown, so the Meltdown
mitigation cannot mitigate Spectre.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; These bugs (both Meltdown and Spectre) really have to be fixed in the CPUs themselves.  Meltdown is the 1000 pound gorilla.  I won&amp;#x27;t be buying any new Intel chips that require the mitigation.  I&amp;#x27;m really pissed off at Intel.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;lists.dragonflybsd.org&amp;#x2F;pipermail&amp;#x2F;users&amp;#x2F;2018-January&amp;#x2F;313758.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;lists.dragonflybsd.org&amp;#x2F;pipermail&amp;#x2F;users&amp;#x2F;2018-January&amp;#x2F;3...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Meltdown, aka “Dear Intel, you suck”</title><url>https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&amp;m=151521435721902&amp;w=2</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DougN7</author><text>I don’t understand the Intel hate.  It’s not like their engineers are dumb or lazy.  This exploit is very hard to imagine before now.  And it’s there because chip makers were trying to wring out more performance.  It’s unfortunate if anythig.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>madez</author><text>Well, there is the ME for one, an omnipotent, mandatory backdoor. Then there are _many_ undocumented opcodes. What does 0f0d00 do? What 0f78c0? What dbe0? I can continue for a very long time. These are just some known unknowns. If you still need more reasons, they are uncooperative when it comes to certain other firmware blobs.&lt;p&gt;If you are open to arguments, there are many good reasons to take a negative stance towards Intel.&lt;p&gt;Fun fact: I sent an overview of unknown instructions in compressed text form to a gmail address, and Google rejected it citing potentially malicious content.</text></comment>