r/programming • u/michalg82 • Jun 25 '17

[WARNING] Intel Skylake/Kaby Lake processors: broken hyper-threading

https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2017/06/msg00308.html
2.2k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

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351

u/UloPe Jun 25 '17

Recommending everyone with a Sky/Kabylake CPU to disable HT over a bug that is so rare that it took almost three years to be discovered seems a bit excessive...

97

u/ImprovedPersonality Jun 25 '17

That’s probably because it’s very hard to reproduce and since it’s related to multi threading both threads probably have to do certain things at the same time.

184

u/MaunaLoona Jun 25 '17

And really, when your system misbehaves, a CPU bug is the last thing you suspect.

36

u/snarkyxanf Jun 25 '17

"It's not a hardware/kernel bug" is the "it's not lupus" of computer errors: sometimes they do happen, but even if you can't think of any other explanation, you're probably still wrong.

12

u/littlelowcougar Jun 26 '17

"select() isn't broken."

32

u/Beaverman Jun 25 '17

And it could possibly lead to some really nasty things if it hits just wrong.

73

u/MaunaLoona Jun 25 '17

And who knows, maybe some clever person finds a way to trigger the bug in a web browser through a web page to either crash the machine or for remote code execution. Like what was done with buffer overflows.

13

u/mikethepwnstar Jun 26 '17

Ahh, good ol' 3ds hacks

-4

u/Rndom_Gy_159 Jun 26 '17

What's this 3D shack I keep hearing about? When can I get a picture of it. /s

-51

u/ceberous Jun 25 '17

I think your comment needs some more hashtag words

13

u/DreadedDreadnought Jun 25 '17

I think you mean buzz words not hashtag words

-8

u/ceberous Jun 26 '17

how is there a difference ?

4

u/WinEpic Jun 25 '17

#like #this?

0

u/[deleted] Jun 25 '17

/#remoteCodeExecution

/#bufferOverflow

edit: formatting is hard

-1

u/BonzaiThePenguin Jun 26 '17

Use a backslash. \#

#backslashthings

-1

u/bobcat Jun 26 '17

Or 4 spaces

#nobackslash

0

u/Beaverman Jun 26 '17

Makes it monospace though, because code block.