Linux has a merged mitigation so when the new kernel comes out Linux users will be safe
Highly recommend Pop OS! It’s been very reliable. I haven’t had anything this steady since Mac OS when I was just doing programming. I tried to go from Mac to Alienware for personal computing and it was terrible, windows blue screened almost once a week if not once every four days.
Switched to Pop OS, enabled Proton in steams preferences for gaming, and it was completely steady. Only thing that doesn’t work is the hibernate. Which isn’t a super big deal to me.
I’d actually say everything has been a better experience than windows. Lutris and pop store have a large variety of games and apps. For example lutris supports GOG and probably epic games. It feels like it’s everything I’d want without the shitty user interfaces and lack of crashes.
I know it’s not the best, but Proton has come a long, long way. I can play D4, Monster Hunter, factorio, lots of stuff.
Not sure if you are joking but Linux gaming is great now. I’ve been gaming for at least the last two years on only Linux. Check out https://www.protondb.com/explore
There hasn’t been a single game I’ve struggled to run in the last few months on proton. I haven’t had a windows PC in like a year ish or more?
I play games heavily too.
Try it out sometime if your setup isn’t extremely niche and maybe you’ll find it to be accommodating.
The weirdest things I’ve had to do are click a box in steam to enable proton usage and reinstall something in Lutris for Battle.net on world of warcraft.
when the new kernel comes out Linux users will be safe
It’s going to take a lot longer than that for most distros to move to latest upstream. This specific fix might be pulled in as a hotfix if you’re lucky, but it still takes time. The latest Ubuntu LTS is on 5.15, for example, which was released in October 2021. Debian Bookworm, which just released last month, uses 6.1 from December 2022.
Critical security fixes are backported. There where a lot of kernels released yesterday that had the fix. For 5.15, 5.15.122 was released with the zenbleed mitigation.
5.15.122 was released with the zen bleed mitigation
But Ubuntu users (for example) won’t get that automatically. Canonical still has to pull the upstream release, run validation, and roll out a patch. It will probably be speedy, but still on the order of several weeks before people see it by default.
This is exactly the kind of thing that gets backported to stable LTS distros tho. The kernel Major.Minor is just the base - it doesn’t tell the whole story.
Why is it that every time there’s drama about hardware, its something I own?
That’s because of monopolies… There are only two brands of PC CPUs you could own…
I feel really lucky that it doesn’t affect Zen 3 since that’s what I have lol but I’m sure they will find some similar bug for Zen 3.
Nice to know that security researchers are giving AMD some love too. Ill be sure to turn the patch off on my 3600 once it rolls around (can’t be losing any frames for something silly like security)
That’s a very bad idea.
The bad news is that the exploit doesn’t require physical hardware access and can be triggered by loading JavaScript on a malicious website.
Planned fix
December 2023
Yikes.
It’s worth noting these are the firmware / microcode fixes.
There’s already a software solution available,
There is a software workaround, you can set the chicken bit DE_CFG[9]. This may have some performance cost, and the microcode update is preferred.
source: https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2023/07/24/3
AMD has also already released a fix for the big boy - the EPYC processor.
How come branch prediction seems so vulnerable to exploits? Both spectre and meltdown were also caused by branch prediction not working quite right.
It wasn’t branch prediction alone, it was the cache combined with branch prediction. The problem is that even discarded outcomes fill the cache with data. Those older vulnerabilities also had the problem that the access permissions check was done after the branch prediction. It’s probably too expensive to do when it’s not even clear yet whether the branch is going to be taken (that’s just speculation on my part though).
The more steps in the instruction pipeline the more ways there are for there to be an error where some result doesn’t get erased when undoing stuff from the wrong branch. It’s basically like telling someone to move into a new house and get settled then stopping them six hours in and trying to make sure you get all their stuff out.
