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It's not miraculous. If the flaw had prevented the system from booting (in a way that has a high repro rate) they would have fixed it.

The system booted in spite of that undocumented instruction. When things work, you don't go looking for undocumented things that are contributing to the working state.

Millions of C programs work accidentally, in spite of undefined behavior. Nothing gets investigated until a compiler change triggers something.

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Don't you think, as a Mac ROM developer, the chances of your software bug being accidentally fixed by the CPU through an undocumented instruction are pretty low? That's what I was getting at when I wrote that.

Of course they would have fixed it if it had prevented the system from booting, I even said that in the article. I still think the odds of what happened here were pretty small. That's what I meant by miraculous.

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