Re: Curious about Copy Fail Linux bug and any relation to FreeBSD

Ralf Mardorf <[email protected]> writes:
> I'm currently suffering from cervical spine syndrome and can't spend
> much time sifting through all the nonsensical claims, but I've already
> come across the following in a quick search.

The person you are quoting is not a FreeBSD committer and does not in
any way represent the FreeBSD project.  He is in fact infamous for
frequently spouting the most absurd nonsense on our mailing lists.

> At first, there were all sorts of unbelievable explanations as to why
> it supposedly only affects Intel CPUs and why it supposedly doesn't
> affect FreeBSD, all of them unqualified claims.

It was pretty well understood from the beginning that Spectre affected
AMD and ARM processors (iirc, AMD initially denied this, but nobody in
infosec took their denial seriously).  There was doubt as to whether
Meltdown did as well.  Nobody worth listening to ever claimed that
FreeBSD was not affected.

See for instance my email to freebsd-security on the day the news broke:

https://mail-archive.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=63739+0+archive/2018/freebsd-security/20180107.freebsd-security

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - [email protected]