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from the I-predict-another-one-in-six-months-tops dept.
Recompiling is unlikely to be a catch-all solution for a recently unveiled Intel CPU vulnerability known as TLBleed, the details of which were leaked on Friday, the head of the OpenBSD project Theo de Raadt says.
The details of TLBleed, which gets its name from the fact that the flaw targets the translation lookaside buffer, a CPU cache, were leaked to the British tech site, The Register; the side-channel vulnerability can be theoretically exploited to extract encryption keys and private information from programs.
Former NSA hacker Jake Williams said on Twitter that a fix would probably need changes to the core operating system and were likely to involve "a ton of work to mitigate (mostly app recompile)".
But de Raadt was not so sanguine. "There are people saying you can change the kernel's process scheduler," he told iTWire on Monday. "(It's) not so easy."
(Score: 3, Informative) by RS3 on Tuesday June 26 2018, @01:50PM (2 children)
Sorry- forgot this: http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Bulldozer/AMD-FX-Series%20FX-6120.html [cpu-world.com]
(Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday June 27 2018, @07:41AM (1 child)
Thanks for the link, RS3! I did not know if it would be worth it to try to rebuild a system, given just the CPU and some memory. Its been my experience that anything with big heat sinks may be old technology that's best left alone. My cellphone may be more powerful.
But sometimes they are little screamers.
I was wondering about using it on some CAD programs that I know my present laptop ( Walmart HP / celeron ) would choke on. ( Hell, this thing chokes on the later Firefox - but works fine with SeaMonkey ). What I have now works fine for web browsing, emails, and doing smaller EAGLE stuff ( but its noticeably struggling to keep up with a 40 sq.in 2-layer PCB! ).
Thanks for the info snippet... that led me to the AM3+ socket, which led me to quite a number of suppliers of motherboards which seem to support it. I would like to look more at those mini-ATX form factors. This thing had a massive heatsink, so it might be a good idea to liquid cool this thing... probably use some of that "EVANS" waterfree coolant used in cars where corrosion is a big problem. But I did not want to invest much time messing with it unless I was going to get a pretty potent system that would run big PCB or Solidworks/3dFusion kind of programs. I don't even want to think about loading that kind of stuff on a machine that buckles under a web browser!
I guess it would be my kind of luck to get the rest of the parts, then discover the CPU has been damaged.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday June 27 2018, @01:13PM
Well, if the CPU turns out damaged, and you're sure because you tested the RAM elsewhere or bought new, you could always buy a nice AM3+ CPU on ebay.
I'm almost embarrassed to admit how long ago I bought my first AMD CPU. I'm pretty open-minded in general, and I see advantages and disadvantages.
You mentioned "large heatsink". Did it have a fan with it, or is it getting cooling from the case fan? If the latter, it should be obvious why it needs to be larger, and it's mostly due to noise. Spinning fan blades very close to heatsink fins becomes a small siren, and not the sailor enchantress kind, but it will attract a certain breed of nerd. But I digress- to make computers quieter, they run fans slower, moved away from the heatsink, and need more heatsink surface area to achieve sufficient cooling.
Plus, AMD stuff tends to run hotter for a competing-class CPU. For your found CPU it's: "Thermal Design Power: 95 Watt" You can look up the TDP for any CPU.
So use the big heatsink / case fan, or buy a heatsink/fan combo. It'll spin up and be noisy for renders, compiles, some CAD stuff, maybe playing full-screen videos, etc.