The latest bad news.

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richb
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Re: The latest bad news.

#11 Post by richb »

Try Youtube. There are many videos on laptop cleaning.
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Stevo
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Re: The latest bad news.

#12 Post by Stevo »

Are these patches in the Debian kernel yet? We will have to figure out how to apply them to our kernels and rebuild them, have an upgrade to a 4.14 kernel that isn't vulnerable, or advise an change to a Debian kernel.

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cyrilus31
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Re: The latest bad news.

#13 Post by cyrilus31 »

asqwerth wrote:I'm quite ignorant about hardware, I confess. I thought heat paste was something only gamers and people who really pushed their processors to the limit considered changing.

As for opening up my laptop, I did it recently because I had to remove the hard drive. It seemed pretty clean on the inside. What am I supposed to clean?
In fact i'm not gamer at all (i should say anymore) so you may consider it's something anybody could do. All you need is a screwdriver, maybe something like tweezers to grab connectors and generally that's all. Your goals are to :
1/ remove dust accumulated into fans
2/ Remove cpu and gpu, generally they are connected to heat pipe which conduct heat to the fans then. You simply have to replace them and add thermal paste between them and heat pipes.
After more than 10 years the original paste is good for nothing and can cause overheating.
Give me inxi output and I will help you to find the good video if you want.

skidoo
Posts: 753
Joined: Tue Sep 22, 2015 6:56 pm

Re: The latest bad news.

#14 Post by skidoo »

This is going to get interesting when everyone's machines are 30% slower and a lot of drivers don't work.
sigh, clickbait headlines & shallow journalism are pimping that narrative, delivering the daily
"Oh Noez -- Archillian Battle Cruiser Spotted, It's Hiding Behind The Moon. We are Doom" (sic)

...which winds up parroted, leading to "hey, let's stand around the water cooler, and trade misinformation" FUDfests.

re "everyone's machines":
No. The patch is applicable to _x86 architecture.
Glad my machines are AMD.
Psst... The patch is applicable to all _x86 architecture. https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/12/28/748

https://lwn.net/Articles/742404/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16060855
https://it.slashdot.org/story/18/01/02/ ... s-redesign
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16062936
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16052451
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7679822 (an older topic, with broader scope)

re "30% slower":
This should have been reported as "30% slower, at most".
The performance impact will depend on the type of workload (processes involving heavy "context switching").
The linked-to (by various clickbaiters) Phoronix article tested/reported only i7 8700K and i7 6800K CPUs, and played up the worst-case scenarios...

re "everyone's machines" (again):
https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/12/28/748 "can be turned on/off on the command line"
~~ turn off by specifying a "nopti" (noquotes) bootline parameter

Many operators of net-isolated and/or dedicated-tasked servers may choose to (or may feel compelled to) specify nopti.
When administering your desktop system, regardless who issued your kernel affected by this patch... you too are free to choose.
To avoid any performance penalty attributable to this patch you can specify the nopti kernel boot parameter.

For an AMD CPU, reputedly (search, educate yourself) no known negative consequences are associated with specifying nopti

If your system has an Intel CPU, and a kernel with is affected by the patch, and you are willing to accept the potential security consequences...
...you're still free (as in, freedumb?) to boot with the nopti bootline parameter
Toward understanding what sort of potential attacks the patch addresses, you might skim read http://people.oregonstate.edu/~jangye/a ... drk-bh.pdf
(a paper which was presented back in 2016, at the ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security)

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Adrian
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Re: The latest bad news.

#15 Post by Adrian »

The patch is applicable to _x86 architecture.
That's the most important piece of info to me, so if I understand correctly it doesn't apply to 64bit Windows and Linux machines?

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azrielle
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Re: The latest bad news.

#16 Post by azrielle »

There was a hint that the problem was more likely to BE a problem with 64bit cpus. Was wondering if a) Using a 32bit version of an OS might be better; and b) If simpler cpus such as Atoms (both the 32bit only models, and the 64bit ones) are vulnerable since they are "in-order" execution and likely don't engage in speculative execution of instructions.
Lenovo T430 i5/3320m 8GB MX17.1/Win7SP1 180GB SSD/128GB mSATA
Lenovo X230 i7/3520m 12GB MX17.1/Win7SP1 500GB SSD 480GB mSATA
Lenovo X131e i3/3227u 8GB MX21Xfce/Win7SP1 500GB SSD
Lenovo 11e Celeron n3150 4GB MX19/Fedora30Games 128GB SSD

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Stevo
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Re: The latest bad news.

#17 Post by Stevo »

Adrian wrote:
The patch is applicable to _x86 architecture.
That's the most important piece of info to me, so if I understand correctly it doesn't apply to 64bit Windows and Linux machines?
As I understand, that applies to both "i386" and "amd64" _x86 architecture. :frown: Phoronix says that modern AMD chips are also marked "insecure" by the patch, though this might change if they prove safe.

The patches haven't been backported to Debian kernels yet.

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v3g4n
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Re: The latest bad news.

#18 Post by v3g4n »

Intel has provided a tool (for both Windows and Linux) to detect if your CPU is vulnerable to this.
https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/27150?v=t

Download the tool.
move it to a new dir (the tarball doesn't have a root dir) then cd there and unpack it.
run as root "python intel_sa00086.py"

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v3g4n
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Re: The latest bad news.

#19 Post by v3g4n »

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en ... tware.html
Systems using Intel ME Firmware versions 6.x-11.x, servers using SPS Firmware version 4.0, and systems using TXE version 3.0 are impacted. You may find these firmware versions on certain processors from the:

1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th generation Intel® Core™ Processor Families
Intel® Xeon® Processor E3-1200 v5 and v6 Product Family
Intel® Xeon® Processor Scalable Family
Intel® Xeon® Processor W Family
Intel Atom® C3000 Processor Family
Apollo Lake Intel Atom® Processor E3900 series
Apollo Lake Intel® Pentium® Processors
Intel® Pentium® Processor G Series
Intel® Celeron® G, N, and J series Processors

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richb
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Re: The latest bad news.

#20 Post by richb »

EDIT: Apparently this tools is not addressing the latest vulnerability, so ignore the comments below as relates to the latest reports.

According to that tool my laptop with an i5 -3337U processor is not vulnerable. The machine is 5 years old. The upshot is do not panic. Just because you have an Intel processor on the list does not mean vulnerability, of course if the tool is accurate.
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