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Processor | AMD Ryzen 7 2700X |
---|---|
Motherboard | MSI B450 Gaming Pro Carbon AC |
Cooling | AMD Wraith Prism |
Memory | 2x 16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-3000 |
Video Card(s) | Colorful iGame GTX 1070 Ti Vulcan X |
Storage | Western Digital Black NVMe 512GB |
Display(s) | Samsung U28D590 28-inch 4K UHD |
Case | Corsair Carbide 100R |
Audio Device(s) | Creative Sound Blaster Recon3D PCIe |
Power Supply | Antec EarthWatts Pro Gold 750W |
Mouse | Razer Abyssus |
Keyboard | Microsoft Sidewinder X4 |
Software | Windows 10 Pro |
There are ominous signs that Intel may be secretly fixing a major security vulnerability affecting its processors, which threatens to severely damage its brand equity among datacenter and cloud-computing customers. The vulnerability lets users of a virtual machine (VM) access data of another VM on the same physical machine (a memory leak). Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are among the big three cloud providers affected by this vulnerability, and Intel is reportedly in embargoed communications with engineers from the three, to release a software patch that fixes the bug. Trouble is, the patch inflicts an unavoidable performance penalty ranging between 30-35%, impacting the economics of using Intel processors versus AMD ones.
Signs of Intel secretly fixing the bug surfaced with rapid changes to the Linux kernel without proper public-visibility of the documentation. The bulk of the changes involve "kernel page table isolation," a feature that prevents VMs from reading each other's data, but at performance costs. Developers note that these changes are being introduced "very fast" by Linux kernel update standards, and even being backported to older kernel versions (something that's extremely rare). Since this is a hardware vulnerability, Linux isn't the only vulnerable software platform. Microsoft has been working on a Windows kernel patch for this issue since November 2017. AMD x86 processors (such as Opteron, Ryzen, EPYC, etc.,) are immune to this vulnerability.
View at TechPowerUp Main Site
Signs of Intel secretly fixing the bug surfaced with rapid changes to the Linux kernel without proper public-visibility of the documentation. The bulk of the changes involve "kernel page table isolation," a feature that prevents VMs from reading each other's data, but at performance costs. Developers note that these changes are being introduced "very fast" by Linux kernel update standards, and even being backported to older kernel versions (something that's extremely rare). Since this is a hardware vulnerability, Linux isn't the only vulnerable software platform. Microsoft has been working on a Windows kernel patch for this issue since November 2017. AMD x86 processors (such as Opteron, Ryzen, EPYC, etc.,) are immune to this vulnerability.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site