from Hacker News

Unexpected Page Fault In Virtualized Environment Advisory

by btmills on 12/10/19, 8:22 PM with 43 comments

• by zelon88 on 12/10/19, 8:38 PM

  Someone should make a graph quantifying the number of "mitigations" and performance impacting patch work for popular Intel SKU's since release.

  It would be interesting to see how many times they've patched the same processor and how much slower they are now than when they were made due to all the mitigations.

• by bonzini on 12/10/19, 8:51 PM

  This seems like the usual processor erratum causing potentially very bad things, but only in very rare conditions that no one really understands. It's not another L1TF or similar.

• by strstr on 12/10/19, 9:19 PM

  Anyone know what conditions are required? The advisory is sparse on details.

  The errata lists the same vague info: https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents...

• by _Codemonkeyism on 12/11/19, 6:41 AM

  It feels like the only mails I get from DigitalOcean are about Intel processors.

• by rossmohax on 12/10/19, 10:00 PM

  Intel now runs bug bounty program with up to $100k payouts (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/security-center/bug-...), where one of the requirements is not to leak vulnerability details.

• by ysleepy on 12/10/19, 10:11 PM

  Skylake and newer.

  Is Broadwell and before not affected or are those not mentioned since their support cycle has ended? I'd be surprised with Intel spinning up Haswell production for lower grade CPUs on 22nm, but I can't be sure.

• by bdibs on 12/10/19, 10:05 PM

  There seem to be quite a few security updates today from Intel: https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/current-activity/2019/12/10/int...

• by _Codemonkeyism on 12/11/19, 6:39 AM

  Intel feels so much like Boeing now.