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The mysterious case of the Linux Page Table Isolation patches

[Various errors and updates are addressed in Quiet in the peanut gallery] tl;dr: there is presently an embargoed security bug impacting apparently all contemporary CPU architectures that implement...

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Hasnain says:

This is fairly scary. The slowdown will be massive... It's also interesting that AMD isn't affected

"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."

Posted on 2018-01-02T20:35:13+0000