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So I don't know how many of you have already heard about this, but it really is large news. AMD processors are not vulnerable to this type of attack.
All computers with Intel chips from the past 10 years appear to be affected. The fix for it? A 30% slower computer! Get ready for some major slow downs.AMD processors are not subject to the types of attacks that the kernelpage table isolation feature protects against. The AMD microarchitecture
does not allow memory references, including speculative references, that
access higher privileged data when running in a lesser privileged mode
when that access would result in a page fault.
Crucially, these updates to both Linux and Windows will incur a performance hit on Intel products. The effects are still being benchmarked, however we're looking at a ballpark figure of five to 30 per cent slow down, depending on the task and the processor model. More recent Intel chips have features – specifically, PCID – to reduce the performance hit.
FindingsThere is presently an embargoed security bug impacting apparently all contemporary CPU architectures that implement virtual memory, requiring hardware changes to fully resolve. Urgent development of a software mitigation is being done in the open and recently landed in the Linux kernel, and a similar mitigation began appearing in NT kernels in November. In the worst case, the software fix causes huge slowdowns in typical workloads.
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