The security of our products is critical for Intel

piguliciSo in short : "the patch used until now it is broken, don't used, wait until we have another one"; glad I blocked and didn't do any update , even for bios, starting this month, the common sense it is to wait and see...

On Sun, Jan 21, 2018 at 12:28 PM, David Woodhouse <dwmw2@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Sun, 2018-01-21 at 11:34 -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > All of this is pure garbage.
> >
> > Is Intel really planning on making this shit architectural? Has
> > anybody talked to them and told them they are f*cking insane?
> >
> > Please, any Intel engineers here - talk to your managers.
>
> If the alternative was a two-decade product recall and giving everyone
> free CPUs, I'm not sure it was entirely insane.

You seem to have bought into the cool-aid. Please add a healthy dose
of critical thinking. Because this isn't the kind of cool-aid that
makes for a fun trip with pretty pictures. This is the kind that melts
your brain.

> Certainly it's a nasty hack, but hey â the world was on fire and in the
> end we didn't have to just turn the datacentres off and go back to goat
> farming, so it's not all bad.

It's not that it's a nasty hack. It's much worse than that.

> As a hack for existing CPUs, it's just about tolerable â as long as it
> can die entirely by the next generation.

That's part of the big problem here. The speculation control cpuid
stuff shows that Intel actually seems to plan on doing the right thing
for meltdown (the main question being _when_). Which is not a huge
surprise, since it should be easy to fix, and it's a really honking
big hole to drive through. Not doing the right thing for meltdown
would be completely unacceptable.

So the IBRS garbage implies that Intel is _not_ planning on doing the
right thing for the indirect branch speculation.

Honestly, that's completely unacceptable too.

> So the part is I think is odd is the IBRS_ALL feature, where a future
> CPU will advertise "I am able to be not broken" and then you have to
> set the IBRS bit once at boot time to *ask* it not to be broken. That
> part is weird, because it ought to have been treated like the RDCL_NO
> bit â just "you don't have to worry any more, it got better".

It's not "weird" at all. It's very much part of the whole "this is
complete garbage" issue.

The whole IBRS_ALL feature to me very clearly says "Intel is not
serious about this, we'll have a ugly hack that will be so expensive
that we don't want to enable it by default, because that would look
bad in benchmarks".

So instead they try to push the garbage down to us. And they are doing
it entirely wrong, even from a technical standpoint.

I'm sure there is some lawyer there who says "we'll have to go through
motions to protect against a lawsuit". But legal reasons do not make
for good technology, or good patches that I should apply.

> We do need the IBPB feature to complete the protection that retpoline
> gives us â it's that or rebuild all of userspace with retpoline.

BULLSHIT.

Have you _looked_ at the patches you are talking about? You should
have - several of them bear your name.

The patches do things like add the garbage MSR writes to the kernel
entry/exit points. That's insane. That says "we're trying to protect
the kernel". We already have retpoline there, with less overhead.

So somebody isn't telling the truth here. Somebody is pushing complete
garbage for unclear reasons. Sorry for having to point that out.

If this was about flushing the BTB at actual context switches between
different users, I'd believe you. But that's not at all what the
patches do.

As it is, the patches are COMPLETE AND UTTER GARBAGE.

They do literally insane things. They do things that do not make
sense. That makes all your arguments questionable and suspicious. The
patches do things that are not sane.

WHAT THE F*CK IS GOING ON?

And that's actually ignoring the much _worse_ issue, namely that the
whole hardware interface is literally mis-designed by morons.

It's mis-designed for two major reasons:

- the "the interface implies Intel will never fix it" reason.

See the difference between IBRS_ALL and RDCL_NO. One implies Intel
will fix something. The other does not.

Do you really think that is acceptable?

- the "there is no performance indicator".

The whole point of having cpuid and flags from the
microarchitecture is that we can use those to make decisions.

But since we already know that the IBRS overhead is <i>huge</i> on
existing hardware, all those hardware capability bits are just
complete and utter garbage. Nobody sane will use them, since the cost
is too damn high. So you end up having to look at "which CPU stepping
is this" anyway.

I think we need something better than this garbage.

Linus

R0H1TWell Intel's spinning their usual BS & they don't seem intent on fixing spectre anytime soon ~
lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1801.2/04628.html

It's probably because, as Linus hinted, the performance hit is huge & even then the (software) fix may not be 100% secure.

Katanai"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."

It seems that my point of view from the start of all this, not downloading beta software created in a panic and waiting for the final patch, was right. A lot of people on this forum criticized me for saying that is the way to go. I dare anyone, now after even Intel says you should uninstall the cancer patch they created, to tell me that I was wrong. Are there still any takers out there?

jsfitz54Question: Can the Patch be undone, for those that had it auto applied? (((OR))) Will it stay in place for some reason and leave behind remnants?

AsRockIf that was the case it would of been fixed many years ago.

mastrdrverSeems relevant (Reddit link): Linus Torvalds on current Meltdown/Spectre patches ~ "Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons."

lexluthermiesterIf they'd known about it, they likely would have redesigned the hardware to fix it as they're doing now. It actually would have been better if all of these problems would have been discovered before the release of the Core series of CPU's.

lexluthermiesterIf they'd known about it, they likely would have redesigned the hardware to fix it as they're doing now. It actually would have been better if all of these problems would have been discovered before the release of the Core series of CPU's.

KatanaiIt seems that my point of view from the start of all this, not downloading beta software created in a panic and waiting for the final patch, was right. A lot of people on this forum criticized me for saying that is the way to go. I dare anyone, now after even Intel says you should uninstall the cancer patch they created, to tell me that I was wrong. Are there still any takers out there?

mcraygsxIntel distribute the microcode to vendors and they delivery microcode update as a part of BIOS update.

$ apt list --upgradable intel-microcode
Listing... Done
intel-microcode/artful-updates,artful-security 3.20180108.0+really20170707ubuntu17.10.1 amd64 [upgradable from: 3.20180108.0~ubuntu17.10.1]

intel-microcode (3.20180108.0+really20170707ubuntu17.10.1) artful-security; urgency=medium

* Revert to 20170707 version of microcode because of regressions on
certain hardware. (LP: #1742933)

-- Marc Deslauriers <email address hidden> Mon, 22 Jan 2018 07:16:40 -0500

AquinusIf I'm reading this correctly, it is telling me that microcode was reverted back to the version from July last year because this regression was so bad, that it's almost like Intel conceding that their fix was worse than the security hole it was attempting to patch. :fear:

kn00tcndont think about the date, microcode isnt supposed to have updates every month

kn00tcnit's not 'so bad', it either has an issue or it doesnt, it's also a single distro's point of reference

Debian distributes each individual Intel microcode update unmodified, as downloaded from Intel.

AsRockthey knew and didn't due to performance loss.

kn00tcnit's not 'so bad', it either has an issue or it doesnt, it's also a single distro's point of reference

dont think about the date, microcode isnt supposed to have updates every month

AsRockI don't believe that for a second, they knew and didn't due to performance loss.

OSdevrIf Ubuntu was a server distro I might understand pulling the update for 'mission critical' reliability reasons but it's a desktop distro

kn00tcn"my point of view", "i was right", "i dare", "cancer", "tell me i was wrong", "i challenge others"

is this an esports match? a more humble attitude would make the points more clear, otherwise it's really hard to care to listen through the filler during an important topic such as security that is out of the user's control... nobody needs to know how much of a victim you were, not everyone read the previous threads

linus torvalds very recently was infuriated (with F bombs) about the intel 'garbage' being requested into the linux kernel, this isnt something to boast about, it's a very disappointing situation...

plus, controlling a few windows updates doesnt mean you're controlling the intial OS state, or the browsers losing performance, or not being able to undo specific items from a service pack, etc

KatanaiI will not install anything on my computer that degrades performance. For Windows 7 the update is KB4056894 I have already hidden it and will never install it...

AssimilatorAren't you the badass. Betting your next post will be "OMG my pc got exploited because of meltdown intel is teh evil no of course it's not my fault that i didn't install the mitigation because i'm a moron".

R-T-BNo one here is a moron. Not installing these updates is foolish in most instances however.

TheinsanegamerNPart of the reason this vulnerability is so dangerous is people like you that leave their systems vulnerable. By the time you hear about widespread exploits, it will likely be too late for you.

Aquinus"If Ubuntu was a server distro"? It's only like, the most widespread Linux server distro

KatanaiAs you can see, I have been called a moron, a fool, people like me are dangerous etc