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Your PC is about to get slower

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GeoffF100
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Your PC is about to get slower

#107561

Postby GeoffF100 » January 3rd, 2018, 7:42 am

A major hardware security issue has been found with all modern Intel processors:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/0 ... sign_flaw/

Patches are being rushed out for Linux and Windows, but these will hit performance:

Best case: 17% slowdown
Worst case: 23%

according to one account. AMD processors are not affected.

GeoffF100
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Re: Your PC is about to get slower

#107596

Postby GeoffF100 » January 3rd, 2018, 9:54 am

My understanding is that the problem affects all other operating systems as well. It is a fundamental problem with the security of modern Intel processors. Linux and Windows are the first to issue fixes, but others will have to follow.

GeoffF100
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Re: Your PC is about to get slower

#107708

Postby GeoffF100 » January 3rd, 2018, 4:53 pm

Here is another article:

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3245606 ... c-mac.html

This article makes it clear in the first sentence that all operating systems are affected. Currently, fixes are only available for Linux it appears, but Microsoft is working on it.

Infrasonic
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Re: Your PC is about to get slower

#107710

Postby Infrasonic » January 3rd, 2018, 5:03 pm

I bet AMD are rubbing their hands, best bit of free advertising they have had in years...

Seems that the synthetic benchmarks caused potentially big slowdowns but real world stuff less so.

Michael Larabel, the open-source guru behind the Linux-centric Phoronix website, has run a gauntlet of benchmarks using Linux 4.15-rc6, an early release candidate build of the upcoming Linux 4.15 kernel. It includes the new KPTI protections for the Intel CPU kernel flaw. The Core i7-8700K saw a massive performance decrease in FS-Mark 3.3 and Compile Bench, a pair of synthetic I/O benchmarks. PostgreSQL and Redis suffered a loss, but to a far lesser degree. Finally, H.264 video encoding, timed Linux kernel compilation, and FFmpeg video conversion tasks didn’t lose anything.

UncleEbenezer
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Re: Your PC is about to get slower

#107724

Postby UncleEbenezer » January 3rd, 2018, 6:26 pm

Techie-press take on it: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/02 ... sign_flaw/ . Huge numbers of comments, some of them detailed and well-informed.

From the comments, a reference to a TMF story from last month: "Intel's CEO Just Sold a Lot of Stock" https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/12/ ... stock.aspx

Though I *think* I recognise the name of the author of that article as a commentator who was persistently bearish on ARM.

GeoffF100
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Re: Your PC is about to get slower

#107739

Postby GeoffF100 » January 3rd, 2018, 7:12 pm

I wondered whether people in the know were shorting Intel and going long on AMD. Here is a chart from Yahoo:

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMD/ ... 5UQyJ9fV19

Very profitable!

Infrasonic
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Re: Your PC is about to get slower

#107773

Postby Infrasonic » January 3rd, 2018, 9:27 pm

Just been reading that some ARM CPU's might be affected too...
https://www.axios.com/massive-chip-flaw ... 78225.html

csearle
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Re: Your PC is about to get slower

#107784

Postby csearle » January 3rd, 2018, 10:39 pm

AMD Phew!

PS Never was a big fan of Intel. Something about "pages" and backwards compatibility haunts me to this day.

Chris

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Re: Your PC is about to get slower

#107786

Postby TedSwippet » January 3rd, 2018, 10:51 pm

Infrasonic wrote:Seems that the synthetic benchmarks caused potentially big slowdowns but real world stuff less so.

My reading of the report suggests that compute-intensive applications are largely unaffected, but anything with a decent load of kernel usage will suffer, because the fix slows down the context switch between user space and kernel space.

So input and output, memory allocation and deallocation, interprocess communications, and time/timer operations are all affected. Any program that does a lot of these will take a hit. It is a rare program that does no input/output at all(!), but some do far more than others. Databases, for example.

GeoffF100
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Re: Your PC is about to get slower

#107800

Postby GeoffF100 » January 4th, 2018, 6:58 am

Servers are likely to take the biggest hit. There are claims that AMD is affected:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-42561169

The Register article that has already been quoted twice in this thread quotes AMD as saying it has not been affected. The BBC article quotes AMD as saying that it has already distributed (microcode?) fixes.

malakoffee
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Re: Your PC is about to get slower

#107807

Postby malakoffee » January 4th, 2018, 8:08 am

Ubuntu Linux fixes have popped up, here, ready for download.

There appear to be files/modules with intel in the name & some with AMD in the name.

I might delay a bit in case some problem emerges. I worry about potential problems with bugs in kernel code (after the recent Ubuntu panic ).

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Re: Your PC is about to get slower

#107847

Postby Stompa » January 4th, 2018, 10:44 am

This seems to suggest that there are two issues rather than one:

https://meltdownattack.com/

UncleEbenezer
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Re: Your PC is about to get slower

#107852

Postby UncleEbenezer » January 4th, 2018, 10:56 am

It seems some of this goes back a long way. From 2007, https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=118296441702631

Not as specific and clear-cut as when DNS troubles that blew up in 2008 turned out to have been deconstructed in detail by Dan Bernstein in 2001, but another demonstration of the world ignoring a security guru.

Infrasonic
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Re: Your PC is about to get slower

#107922

Postby Infrasonic » January 4th, 2018, 4:13 pm

https://www.ghacks.net/2018/01/04/micro ... y-updates/
Microsoft released out-of-band security updates for Windows yesterdays that address a recently revealed major security bug in Intel, AMD and ARM processors.

The updates are filed under the IDs KB4056888 , KB4056890. KB4056891, KB4056892, and KB405689. All updates share the following description:


https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/hel ... -kb4056892

https://www.catalog.update.microsoft.co ... =KB4056892

I've just installed KB4056892 through the normal Windows Update channel, I'll report back on any major performance hits for those that want to hold off...

Breelander
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Re: Your PC is about to get slower

#107930

Postby Breelander » January 4th, 2018, 4:26 pm

Infrasonic wrote:I've just installed KB4056892 through the normal Windows Update channel, I'll report back on any major performance hits for those that want to hold off...


Apparently the major hit is if you are running a server, for desktop users and gamers there's little difference. Comprehensive test results here...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qZksorJAuY

Infrasonic
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Re: Your PC is about to get slower

#107936

Postby Infrasonic » January 4th, 2018, 4:46 pm

Breelander wrote:
Infrasonic wrote:I've just installed KB4056892 through the normal Windows Update channel, I'll report back on any major performance hits for those that want to hold off...


Apparently the major hit is if you are running a server, for desktop users and gamers there's little difference. Comprehensive test results here...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qZksorJAuY


According to that video desktop '4K read' on NVME SSD's took a hit, but I would imagine the majority of us are still on SATA drives so it's somewhat moot.

Infrasonic
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Re: Your PC is about to get slower

#107950

Postby Infrasonic » January 4th, 2018, 5:17 pm

I have done a couple of reboots and so far at least can't detect any performance hit whatsoever, everything seems as snappy as before.

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Re: Your PC is about to get slower

#108335

Postby Slarti » January 6th, 2018, 3:31 pm

Infrasonic wrote:I have done a couple of reboots and so far at least can't detect any performance hit whatsoever, everything seems as snappy as before.


Unless your AV has also had an update that is part of the is procedure, you may not have the MS Patch activated yet.
There is something about AVs adding a registry key to prevent Blue Screen of Death when the AV conflicts with the OS.


Oh and the patch is breaking things, Sandboxie being the only name I recognised of those mentioned.

Be careful out there.
Slarti

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Re: Your PC is about to get slower

#108379

Postby jackdaww » January 6th, 2018, 6:30 pm

I've just installed KB4056892 also -- if that is the relevant fix -- not noticed any difference.

using 128gb ssd .

Breelander
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Re: Your PC is about to get slower

#108393

Postby Breelander » January 6th, 2018, 6:59 pm

Slarti wrote:...Unless your AV has also had an update that is part of the is procedure, you may not have the MS Patch activated yet.
There is something about AVs adding a registry key to prevent Blue Screen of Death when the AV conflicts with the OS.

Oh and the patch is breaking things, Sandboxie being the only name I recognised of those mentioned.


jackdaww wrote:I've just installed KB4056892 also -- if that is the relevant fix -- not noticed any difference.


Yes, that's the relevant patch, it takes you up to 1709 os build 16299.192.

The' AV bit' is that some AV's are not compatible and need updating. Those that are compatible should have (but some don't) set a registry key to indicate that they are compatible. Without this key KB4056892 won't be offer to you through Windows Update.

The 'breaking things' bit is down to a known issue with RPC calls. The main victim of this seems to be the 'ASUS AI Suite'. Apparently a beta version is already out that should work in 16299.192.

For a full list of the 'Known Issues' see: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/hel ... -kb4056892

Oh, and I have had the patch and don't notice anything different.


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