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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)
"Higher than expected reboots"? What kind of newspeak is it?
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.
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.
"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.
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
The fact that they took half a year to deliver this cluster**** could be an indicator that no true "fix" is possible or that the performance losses of a true fix would have a far worse overall impact than just accepting random reboots.
I understand that they'd likely need a multi-government bailout and years of production time to replace all of the broken processors, but facing reality and moving forward with a real fix feels like the healthiest thing for the system as a whole. How much time and money is being wasted worldwide by IT folks and software engineers on this fiasco?
Fuck Intel. Enough is enough. I'm ordering four billion transistors on digi-key right fucking now.
#DeleteFacebook
Can't steal data from a CPU while its power cycling!
--
Round and a round and a round we go
You're assuming they spent half a year working on a fix. I think it's far more likely that:
2 months were wasted by engineers trying to convince management that the problem really was potentially very serious
2 months waiting for management to try to figure out who to blame and how to make sure it wouldn't reflect negatively on them or impact their departmental budget or personal performance bonuses
1.5 months for PR to come up with the best possible language to make sure they could paint the entire industry as being equally affected, while simultaneously the lawyers tried to find the largest possible scraps of TP to cover their corporate *sses
.5 months working on a fix
An imperfect plan executed violently is far superior to a perfect plan. -- George Patton
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.
Multiple exploits are available, aren't they?
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