Re: "Meltdown" and "Spectre": Every modern processor has unfixable security flaws

["Thomas Schmitt" <scdbackup@gmx.net>]

Hi,

tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
> Does any of the processors in the M68K family support VM?

They did since the early 1980s when i wondered what the advantage of an
68010 would be over an 68000 (with HP BASIC: none).
  http://gunkies.org/wiki/MC68010

After all, early Sun, HP and Apollo Unix workstations were based on 680X0.


> Does any of the M68K family members prefetch speculatively?

The last one (68060) had Branch Prediction, which implies some kind of
speculative execution and data prefetching.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68000_series


Good news: Google claims to have a software remedy against Spectre,
called the "Retpoline". It keeps the CPU speculator busy with harmless
things while vulnerable commands are executed. I guess we will see it soon
as compiler option.
  https://support.google.com/faqs/answer/7625886
(I love the image of a hyperactive 7-year old child wrapped in a warehouse
 of trampolines.)

Man against hardware. Who will finally win ?


Have a nice day :)

Thomas