Another round of speculative-execution vulnerabilities [LWN.net]

Another round of speculative-execution vulnerabilities

Posted Aug 9, 2023 9:48 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769)
In reply to: Another round of speculative-execution vulnerabilities by willy
Parent article: Another round of speculative-execution vulnerabilities

My computer is idle waiting for user input 99% of the time. I might be happy with a slower, non-speculative CPU for most use. High-performance code for gaming or video decoding (or perhaps a kernel compile) can be explicitly tagged as less sensitive, and scheduled on a separate high-performance core. Indeed, CPU-intensive stuff is nowadays becoming GPU-intensive instead. It's possible that in ten years, with number-crunching offloaded to the GPU, the evolutionary niche for big, superscalar CPUs will disappear.

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Another round of speculative-execution vulnerabilities

Posted Aug 9, 2023 10:45 UTC (Wed) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link] (1 responses)

>My computer is idle waiting for user input 99% of the time.

Yes, but then, if I click a button, I want today's massive software stack triggered by this action to run as fast as possible. Otherwise it becomes non-interactive.

Another round of speculative-execution vulnerabilities

Posted Aug 9, 2023 13:53 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

If only it could speculatively run all that Javascript in anticipation of you clicking the button.

Another round of speculative-execution vulnerabilities

Posted Aug 9, 2023 10:50 UTC (Wed) by adobriyan (subscriber, #30858) [Link] (2 responses)

> My computer is idle waiting for user input 99% of the time.

> I might be happy with a slower, non-speculative CPU for most use.

> High-performance code for gaming or video decoding (or perhaps a kernel compile) can be explicitly tagged as less sensitive, and scheduled on a separate high-performance core.

Full x86_64 allmodconfig build takes about 3.5-4 hours on 1 core and kernel is not the slowest project to build.

Developers still need _many_ fast cores for parallel compilation.

Another round of speculative-execution vulnerabilities

Posted Aug 9, 2023 14:16 UTC (Wed) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link] (1 responses)

IMHO there should be no problem disabling mitigations for this kind of thing. If you're the only person using your computer, what difference do they make? Any processes are probably running as you anyway. If you let untrusted code on your computer you're probably screwed with or without these vulns.

Another round of speculative-execution vulnerabilities

Posted Aug 9, 2023 21:45 UTC (Wed) by DemiMarie (subscriber, #164188) [Link]

“If you let untrusted code on your computer you're probably screwed with or without these vulns.” Only if you are not using any form of sandboxing. If you are using a web browser, you are.