Meltdown and Spectre 101 Vulnerability

[raptalia]

By now most of us will have heard of the Meltdown and Spectre101 vulnerabilities inherent in Intel, AMR and AMD chips. I have just received advice from McAfee that I should ensure that Windows auto updates are switched on as Microsoft should release Windows update on or about Tuesday 9th January which will help patch the problem.

Information supplied by McAfee also suggests that Intel chips produced in the past twenty years are vulnerable to both Meltdown and Spectre 101. At this stage AMD chips are only susceptible to Spectre 101.

At this stage there are no reports of any criminal activity taking advantage of this situation but I imagine that it will not be long before we start to hear of some.

Anyone have any further information or advice?

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/whats-behind-the-intel-design-flaw-forcing-numerous-patches/

 

[Helfarch]

It's all ****ed.

I have seen people who use VR update and then they can't run VR anymore, incidentally a bunch of VR headsets came up for sale on the same forum.

It is server side that is the most rooted, general desktops not so much. Intel has been the top dog in servers for a while...except their advantage and then some has been wiped out by fixes for Meltdown for VMs and database systems. If there were more than two real players in the CPU space Intel would cease to be however they are too big to fail.

This is on the same level as the VW shenanigans but on a much larger scale, Intel cheated to get more performance out of their chips.

 

[Helfarch]

lol compiling on Fedora from 4 to 21 minutes after patching in one example.