TenFourFox Development

That's actually an interesting accidental point.

How many embedded CPU's with speculation might be affected? You may say "none" but there are Cortex CPUs embedded into FPGAs (either directly or form of IP cores). What if enterprise routers have them? What if TVs have them?

I know many Cortex's aren't affected. The point is, anything that needs a "fast enough" CPU to benefit from OoO scheduling is possibly at risk, right? So while most embedded devices use cheaper, less complex CPUs, there are plenty that don't--as more powerful CPUs (which offer speculation) are becoming cheaper and cheaper.

A Raspberry Pi 3 has a Cortex-A53 (because they're cheap). They're luckily not affected, but those CPUs and faster are cheap enough to throw onto a $35 retail price computer. What's running in your $800 internet-connected 4K TV?

Per the Pi 3 explaination page:

>Examples of out-of-order processors include the Intel Pentium 2 (and most subsequent Intel and AMD x86 processors with the exception of some Atom and Quark devices), and many recent ARM cores, including Cortex-A9, -A15, -A17, and -A57.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/why-raspberry-pi-isnt-vulnerable-to-spectre-or-meltdown/

The A9, 15, 17, and A57 are all affected and used across TONS of devices in the world. They're very popular not just in chip form (as the primary CPU), but also in IP cores (inside an FPGA), as well as "secondary CPU" systems attached to FPGAs or other CPU's.

And that's just one brand of one type of…

Based on your subcomment about evaluation, I'm very interested to hear your opinions about Talos' offerings - up to now I've only heard anecdotes from individuals drinking the security+ownership kool-aid.

What IBM offers is probably a lot more coherent and takes better advantage of what the POWER architecture has to offer, such as larger quantities of RAM, the per-node interconnect fabric, faster I/O (not just PCIe), etc (admittedly totally naive here). Plus of course there's z/OS, which I know enough about to respect (and want to play with someday :) ).

Talos basically offers only Linux and a mildly DIY standing-up experience (https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-semi-review-of-raptor-talos-ii.html), although this is likely to be reasonably painless for non-desktop configurations (and perhaps volume orders can come preconfigured).

As a bit of a pet idea I kind of want to colocate one of the 2U or 4U systems for generic web serving and similar duties, but I fear that running a blog/discussion system on such a machine may result in a constant effort (on my part) at keeping discussion focused on the "it's a different architecture, what comp-sci interesting things can we do with it" aspect instead of getting distracted by shallow OCD-meta-security bikeshedding.

(It's kind of sad that the collective consensus about new/different architectures has to always be about security nowadays, and not about unbiased exploration, which is what we're best at)

No problem, I understand. In your shoes I may have even done the same thing.

Just in case you didn't see them (they're not exactly easy to find with Google etc. for some reason), there are a number of positive reviews or comments online from various people. I know one thing we haven't (yet) done is to start assembling all the success stories around our hardware; this is always challenging due to the number of people that use the hardware without posting online for privacy reasons etc.

Without further ado:

Slightly out of date (the software now available for POWER is significantly more robust than it was at the time -- we even have Fedora desktop ISOs showing up now for POWER):

http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-semi-review-of-raptor-talos-ii.html

Various other (more recent) comments from our user base:

https://twitter.com/RobinBa40108750/status/1179078295981363203

https://twitter.com/tsundeoku/status/1171414555089494016

https://twitter.com/alnesbit/status/1170425263559254017

https://twitter.com/klauskiwi/status/1164273128588972032

https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/1161438996586803200

https://mastodon.sdf.org/@jirka/102520125253219962

Just wanted to show a little bit of the other side of things, for context. :)

This is why I argue that one of the best things that the Free/Libre software developer community can start doing is optimizing for lower spec machines. Microsoft and Apple are either too closely nit or drectly provide hardware to be prolonging the liftime of hardware they sell. In optimizing open OS's it can prolong the life time of hardware by a significant margin and it means that lower in come folks are not left in the dark. I don't just mean in well off countries, but if you are in the lower classes of the global south - there is no other option.

These was (is? - Not sure) a version of Firefox for PowerPC MaxOSX - TenFour Browser - that brought forward modern features/support of Firefox to Macs that were long past their prime. They mentioned that their favorite story in time of development was "One of my favourite reports was from a missionary in Myanmar using a beat-up G4 mini over a dialup modem; I hope he is safe during the present unrest. "

http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-end-of-tenfourfox-and-what-ive.html

This is what can happen when things are optimized for the people, not the business. This is part of why I still use a Core 2 Duo as my daily runner, if it ain't broke don't fix it.

I have only skimmed these articles, but they address your question regarding POWER:

https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Speculative_Execution_Vulnerabilities_of_2018

https://www.ibm.com/blogs/psirt/potential-impact-processors-power-family/

https://www.talospace.com/2018/08/l1-terminal-fault-another-good-day-to.html

http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/07/netspectre-not-much-of-powerpc-threat.html

http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/01/actual-field-testing-of-spectre-on.html

http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/01/more-about-spectre-and-powerpc-or-why.html

http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/01/is-powerpc-susceptible-to-spectre-yep.html

The _Talospace_ and _TenFourFox Development_ articles are by Cameron Kaiser, who is active on HN (and Blogger) as classichasclass.

Edit: Add missing 'and' in last sentence.

Surprisingly, due to architectural limitations, it isn't affected by either of the issues in spite of having some speculative execution capabilities. The G5 might be but it appears the G3 and G4 are good to go based on this detailed writeup I found.

"...the G3 and the G4, because of their limitations on indirect branching, are at least somewhat more resistant to Spectre-based attacks because it is harder to cause their speculative execution pathways to operate in an attacker-controllable fashion (particularly the G3 and the 7400, which do not have a link stack cache). So, if you're really paranoid, dust that old G3 or Sawtooth G4 off. You just might have the Yosemite that manages to survive the computing apocalypse." [1]

[1] http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/01/more-about-spectre-and-powerpc-or-why.html