Slashdot Mirror
Intel Urges OEMs and End Users To Stop Deploying Spectre Patch As It May 'Introduce Higher Than Expected Reboots' (intel.com)
Intel executive vice president Neil Shenoy said on Monday that the chip-maker has identified the source of some of the recent problems, so it is now recommended that users skip the available patches. From the blog post: We recommend that OEMs, cloud service providers, system manufacturers, software vendors and end users stop deployment of current versions, as they may introduce higher than expected reboots and other unpredictable system behavior.
You mean like, more than zero? Apart from a planned a kernel upgrade I never reboot. My systems also don’t reboot spontaneously.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Iâ(TM)m glad they are telling us to leave our systems insecure, that is helpful advice
Couldn't be bothered to do it right the first time.
"Higher than expected reboots"? What kind of newspeak is it?
When can we deploy that, Intel?
Was Intel expecting? Me, I was expecting one to install the patch. I guess anything more is, technically, higher than expected. Also, this kind of mealy mouthed garbage is why Linus is so made at you right now Intel...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I for one welcome our more often than expected rebooting overlords!
Did they just roll out a patch in the last 30 days, or what's going on over there? This is the kind of instability one would expect from a hastily produced patch developed over a month by a small team. According to reports, Intel has known about the vuln for 7+ months. Were they not working on a patch this whole time? I would assume they were on iteration 5 or 6 of the patch by the time they broke the embargo a week early.
moox. for a new generation.
Gosh, Paul, I was expecting the server to reboot 3 times today as per normal. But so far we've had 4 reboots and it's barely mid-afternoon. What is going on in there!?
Some famous person should finally bomb intel over their "higher than usual" BS. It's an insult to every single person who's reading this idiotic Slashdot news post. Non-broken "systems" don't have "unexpected reboots" ever. FFS.
these clowns screwed this up royally. I undid the microcode update for Linux and am waiting for a real fix to this mess. Then we shall see and weigh the performance cost.
They thought they spent enough money astro-turfing that they wouldn't need to spend any more developing a patch. When the astro-turfing campaign failed, they had to scramble to produce something that nobody would use but that everyone would believe was "best effort."
... to Intel's announcement.
Especially given what he had to say about the patches in the first place:
http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/l...
Check your premises.
Maybe it's time for a slightly more measured approach?
"We recommend everyone stop deployment of Intel CPUs". Higher than expected reboots? More than 1 to install the update? The root cause is design flaws and inadequate testing of major low level patches. Google new about these issues months ago and Intel did (or should have) too. They rushed the release so the stock price does not tank not because it was ready. They normally take many months or years to test these design changes or updates and now it will be a long time before they have new CPUs that don't need fixes (or at least these fixes). May be they should have worked around the clock months ago when they did not need to be rushed.
and let amd eypc crush them in benchmarks
The only way to truly fix things is to replace the CPU. And that would really hurt/destroy Intel's bottom line.
;)
Which leaves them flailing about wildly for some other appearance of a solution/solution to, at the very least cover their butts, mean while costing them a little as possible.
Just my 2 cents
Intel has known about this since 1995.
They only learned that exploit know-how was surfacing roughly 7 months ago.
In any case, they failed us. Their punishment will be to continue being part of the industry cartel, and to continue raking in buckets of money.
It just means there is no decent way to fix these problems. Decent meaning, with a microcode update only and without a major performance hit.
You need both microcode updates and software updates working together, and it has to be done in such a way that the software vendors do not have to completely rewrite their software, and that the performance does not go down the drain completely. That is difficult, and maybe impossible.
On top of that, the time needed to fix a problem with this kind of potential impact increases with the square of the number of stakeholders involved in the process.
And then of course there is the potential liability. Just the way you fix this problem, or not, could open up whole new liability risks for Intel. So everything Intel puts out on this probably has to be vetted by their lawyers first.
Maybe it is a small miracle that patches even exist after 6 months.
In other words their patch crashes your machine.
This reminds me of the various colorful circumlocutions people around the world use for death. In France someone who dies "eats daisies by the roots". In Germany he "gives up his spoon". In China he "goes to sell salted duck eggs."
I suppose in Intel-speak death would be "non-transitory pulmonary quiescence."
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Golfclap?
Golfclap
*GOLFCLAP*
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
Can't steal data from a CPU while its power cycling!
--
Round and a round and a round we go
"According to reports, Intel has known about the vuln for 7+ months."
Re-post: Intel: Years of insufficient management.
So after having months and months to create a patch to their borked design, they fail.
Now in a few measly weeks (days) they have a real patch that's going to do the job.
For everyone (including me) that started performance testing patches before you deploy them.... back to Step 1.
Whereas eating a healthy diet and exercising regularly causes fewer than expected deaths.
"In any case, [Intel] failed us"
Dude: Intel is a corporation. It's certainly seems to have done very well for those that matter... it's shareholders. Are you a shareholder?
If otoh, you want to buy chips from somewhere beholden and accountable to the public, help figure out the Open Hardware movement.
Linus Torvalds Calls Intel Patches 'Complete and Utter Garbage'
According to various tech articles, all their CPU cores are essentially the same chip logic but with different fabrication lab settings for the manufacture process. Whatever features (maximum clock speed, cache size) and defects each die has, dictates what type of processor it becomes (i5, i6, i7, Xeon). They have to get the microcode to work on all those combinations.
Intel Doeshide.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Not only has the microcode patch caused unexpected reboots from Intel's CPUs but it's also causing spontaneous AMD purchases! ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Yep, let's throw the solutions out there before we even know if they work right. How many will know how to go back to a previous bios version, or uninstall a Windows update. I'd rather take my chances with the threats then with the fixes.
"Unpredictable system behavior".
Clusterfuck.
Burn Intel, burn.
and plan to look into the class action suits. Had I known I would have held off or bought a Ryzen. I'm not expecting Intel to buy me new CPUs but as a gamer the 5-10% hit I'm seeing will eventually caught up to me and force an upgrade sooner than intended.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Spectre cannot be practically used for any exploit - it's Intel PR's red herring, it's bullshit.
Just read up, educate yourselves (though half the people on /. are the proverbial choir I'm preaching to, I guess).
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
My next system will be AMD.
Lack of ECC support in desktop SKUs, cheeping out on PCIe lanes and a string of zero integrity marketing doublespeak including campaign to conflate meltdown /w spectre and now "higher than expected reboot" being the main reasons.
General existence of timing side channels against branch predictors has been public knowledge for at least 15 years. Now when a ridiculous UNRELATED problem is discovered in Intel silicon red alert spectre spectre spectre... they are breaking shit and causing real damage in the process just to cover their asses. Fuck 'em.
RE: ... absolute no unexploded reboots ...
Yeah, Intel is still working on that. Give them a couple of months, then all reboots will be guaranteed to explode.
don't worry, it's all double-plus good
Intel, only 24 years late.
Intel Inside!
(Sorry about your luck dude)
Oh rite. Already did. http://www.businessinsider.com/intel-ceo-krzanich-sold-shares-after-company-was-informed-of-chip-flaw-2018-1
When is that fucker going to be charged?
Intel and Microsoft are both run by incompetent Hindu chimps. What do we get for our money? Windows 10 and meltdown
Have you ever worked at a large company? EVERYTHING is produced by a small team, even if the company has 100k employees.
This is especially true for an OLD large company like Intel. The older the company, the more layers of overhead in the way of the problem solvers (e.g., clueless project managers, people managers and executives who are technically incapable yet in the critical path).
So much for getting this shit done early.
There is a middle ground. A corporation can be regulated, or punished, until they deliver better service/products and less profit to their shareholders.
There is nothing wrong with this, and indeed it is a key part of the social contract to which all businesses are beholden.
I replaced my home server last year with an AMD Ryzen and have never been happier.
Best post in the thread. Keep it up!
Go to hell Intel.
Haven't you listened to the lawyer-speak at the end of pretty much every drug commercial? For instance, Breo Ellipta, an inhaler used to treat asthma has this warning "People with asthma who take long-acting beta2-adrenergic agonist (LABA) medicines, such as vilanterol (one of the medicines in BREO), have an increased risk of death from asthma problems." (Emphasis added)
There's a hit there on the top end. Also in synthetics. I'm not currently seeing the frame rate dips because my GTX 760 bottlenecks that. In 5 years that won't be true (just like it wasn't true when I put that 760 on my old A10-5800). I don't upgrade my CPU & GPU in tandem. I tend to buy more CPU than I need and wait for the price of graphics to come down.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
For my gaming PC, I replaced by aging 2500K with a 7700K many months ago.
I returned it due to unacceptable thermal performance and Intel's lame ass corporate response (crazy temp spikes and high load temps at stock settings using a 240mm AIO with Gentle Typhoon fans; Intel's response was "yeah those temps are OK, but don't OC it"... which is, you know, the point of buying a K CPU).
Bought a 7600K instead. I'm still pissed.
For the longest time, I havent seriously thought about an AMD CPU for my gaming PC... but Intel is just lazy these days.
maybe a 1070. Both of those are way outside my price range. But so was the equivalent to the 760 I'm rocking now. Heck, the i5 I just bought only just now came down to what I was willing to pay (got it for $150 on sale at Fry's Electronics). But it's still overkill for all the games I play and will be for the next 5 years... if the performance doesn't tank due to patches. I mostly play console ports that are GPU bound.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/