Windows 10 1H-2019 Update to Reduce Performance Impact of Spectre V2 Mitigations

[btarunr]

Microsoft is working to reduce the performance impact of "Spectre" V2 security vulnerability software mitigation with its next major update to Windows 10. The major update that's scheduled for the first half of 2019, will feature the "Retpoline" mitigation enabled on the operating system's kernel by default. Retpoline will be enabled in addition something Microsoft's OS kernel developer Mehmet Iyigun calls "import optimization." Together, the two reduce the impact of Spectre V2 software mitigation to "noise-level" (i.e. that which can be discounted for random variation, or minimal).



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[Durvelle27]

I see more broken PCs in the future

 

[Octopuss]

I'll rather buy an AMD processor.

 

[m4dn355]

Me too, intel is going dodo.

 

[londiste]

I'll rather buy an AMD processor.

Me too, intel is going dodo.

This patch applies to AMD processors too.

 

[phanbuey]

nice!

 

[m4dn355]

This patch applies to AMD processors too.

AMD's platform is Spectreless.

 

[R-T-B]

I'll rather buy an AMD processor.

AMD is affected by Spectre v2 as well. And the mitigations are global anyhow.

AMD's platform is Spectreless.

Nope. You are thinking of Meltdown and Spectre variant 1.

 

[m4dn355]

AMD is affected by Spectre v2 as well. And the mitigations are global anyhow.



Nope. You are thinking of Meltdown and Spectre variant 1.

You are right.
I can't keep track of all those vulnerabilities, patches, updates and so on. . .

 

[SIGSEGV]

AMD is affected by Spectre v2 as well. And the mitigations are global anyhow.



Nope. You are thinking of Meltdown and Spectre variant 1.

Not sure, if your statement is true.
https://www dot reddit dot com/r/Amd/comments/7o2i91/technical_analysis_of_spectre_meltdown/

This attack requires poisoning the CPU's BTB. This is easy on at least Intel Haswell CPUs (and probably some other Intel CPUs), because BTB entries are aliased in a very predictable way. Some recent ARM Cortex-A series CPU cores are reportedly vulnerable too, for the same reason. It is much more difficult on all AMD CPUs, because BTB entries are not aliased - the attacker must know (and be able to execute arbitrary code at) the exact address of the targeted branch instruction.

?

 

[R-T-B]

Not sure, if your statement is true.
https://www dot reddit dot com/r/Amd/comments/7o2i91/technical_analysis_of_spectre_meltdown/



?

It's true. Diffilcult does not equal impossible. AMD has since released AGESA updates for Spectre variant 2 so they clearly think it still needs patching.