Security (Was: OpenMPI 5.0 to be 32-bit only ?)

["Kingsley G. Morse Jr." <kingsley@loaner.com>]

Hi Alastair,

Thanks for relaying OpenMPI's upstream
maintainer's interest in our opinions on
maintaining 32 bit support.

My humble comments are 

1.) 32 bit hardware can be more secure because
    it's so old it predates back doors known as

        Intel's Management Engine[1] and

        AMD's Platform Secure Processor[2]

2.) and I'm OK with reporting bugs.

Thanks again,
Kingsley


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine#Security_vulnerabilities

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processor#Reported_vulnerabilities




On 02/07/2023 09:54, Alastair McKinstry wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I've been pinged by the upstream maintainer of OpenMPI    Jefff Squyres as
> to our opinions on maintaining 32-bit support.
> 
> See a  thread here: https://github.com/open-mpi/ompi/pull/11282
> 
> Until now I've asked for OMPI to hold off going to 64-bit only; saying we
> can help with the maintenance burden with our testing infrastructure.
> 
> But we're not well suited to run multi-node test jobs.
> 
> If 32-bit support is dropped in OMPI we can switch to MPICH as the default
> on those archs instead, but the core problem remains: how much can we
> support and test on 32-bit?
> 
> (Note:  We're at OpenMPI 4.1.4 now for Bookworm; no change planned)
> 
> Comments please,
> 
> 
> Alastair McKinstry
> 
> -- 
> Alastair McKinstry,
> GPG: 82383CE9165B347C787081A2CBE6BB4E5D9AD3A5
> e: mckinstry@debian.org, im: @sceal.ie:mckinstry
> 

-- 
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