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Comment by orf | Hacker News Reader

> Because they give reasonable deadlines for companies to fix security bugs (~90 days), they are kept out of the loop by hardware vendors like Intel who requested 1 year to fix meltdown.

Is 90 days really a reasonable timeframe to fix something like meltdown? I agree with your whole comment in general, but hardware/microcode issues at Intel's scale are a different beast than some buffer overflow.

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Not to forget, Intel have said this collection of exploits cannot be fixed in microcode, only mitigated - it's so fundamental to the CPU hardware that it requires redesigning the chip to fix properly. The mitigation has led to serious performance hits and further problems down the line. And the permanent fix requires eventually replacing the CPU.

As has been previously noted, Meltdown, Spectre and related exploits came about because nobody ever thought it would be possible to access the cache from other processes. 1 year is probably quite reasonable for Intel to redesign the architecture (in fact, is probably going to stretch to 2 years or more), but people need security fixes now. In this case, it looks like OpenBSD are taking the right approach.

OpenBSD and DragonFly had their meltdown mitigations done in a couple of weeks from when it was publicly disclosed. If it's good enough for projects developed by handfuls of volunteers, it's good enough for the multi-hundred billion dollar megacorps.

So you're saying if a small software operation can put in place mitigations in X time then a absolutely massive hardware operation with hundreds of product lines consisting of some of the most advanced, ridiculously complex, slow to develop chips in the world can push a fix to many billions of devices in X time as well, whilst ensuring backwards compatibility and reducing the performance impact across the mind mindbogglingly large number of different workloads that their chips are used for.

Makes sense. 90 days is more than enough.

Implementing KPTI didn't involve any of what you just said.

Exactly. So how can you compare the work that's required from Intel to patch the flaw in new designs + mitigate it with microcode vs the work that's required from 'projects developed by handfuls of volunteers'?

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