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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday January 02 2018, @02:29AM   Printer-friendly
from the starting-off-the-new-year-right dept.

Spotted over on HN:

The mysterious case of the Linux Page Table Isolation patches (archive)

tl;dr: there is presently an embargoed security bug impacting apparently all contemporary CPU architectures that implement virtual memory, requiring hardware changes to fully resolve. Urgent development of a software mitigation is being done in the open and recently landed in the Linux kernel, and a similar mitigation began appearing in NT kernels in November. In the worst case the software fix causes huge slowdowns in typical workloads. There are hints the attack impacts common virtualization environments including Amazon EC2 and Google Compute Engine, and additional hints the exact attack may involve a new variant of Rowhammer.

Turns out 2018 might be more interesting than first thought. So grab some popcorn and keep those systems patched!


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @05:32AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @05:32AM (#616629)

    But how are monoculture pushers going to get lots of money if you spread over different vendors?

    Oh, the humanity, the software makers would have to stick to common things and agree on them, instead of steamrolling everything with own policy. And they would have to test 32, 64, little endian, big endian... and above all, compete with others. You damn communists! /s

    Yes, that is a veiled hit at RH and systemd (you probably had the MS one in mind already... worst monoculture). We have lost enough CPU archs already (SPARC, Alpha, and no yet dead but not very used Power), and we seem in the path to kill some OSes (after all the old classic Unix) or just make them poor copies of the one True Carmine Penguin, second class citizens. That must stop, or the "correct" plague will be big trouble.

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