On 3/25/2018 8:07 AM, juan wrote:
On Sun, 25 Mar 2018 07:48:06 +1000 jamesd@echeque.com wrote:
On 3/23/2018 2:00 AM, Georgi Guninski wrote:
On Thu, Mar 22, 2018 at 09:24:24PM +1000, jamesd@echeque.com wrote:
The original CPU design was purchased from the US, but a variety of chip makers have been improving on the design in a variety of ways, so it is not US cloned, but is US descended - rather distantly descended by now.
according to the interwebz, your system is ARM based and in addition ARM is vulnerable to spectre. how many vulnerabilities like spectre affect the "US design"?
The Orange Pi Cpu does not do speculative execution, therefore is not vulnerable to spectre.
I think some ARM processors do?
Possibly they do. There are a lot of Arm processors. Pretty sure the new Samsung ARM processor does speculative execution, but I don't have any concrete information - it is just that they threw everything fashionable into that processor, or claimed to do so. And if it does not have speculative execution, throwing everything fashionable into a processor is likely to result in some other security holes.
Point being, it seems hard, even for the chinese govt, to know for sure that the system isn't backdoored by many of the western scum 'players' in the 'industry'.
Again, Orange Pi is all Chinese manufacture, plus western open source. Hence I would expect all Chinese backdoors. Speculative execution puts smarts on the chip that really belong in the compiler. It is a bad design choice, the wrong way to do things, that was probably implemented to keep information in house, that they did not want to put into an open source compiler under the GNU license. Had they done it right, would have had to put that technology into the GNU compiler, since everything has to run linux, or a linux derived operating system such as android, and thus had to license the technology to everyone. And every other chip maker in the entire world would have been able to copy what they did, and adapt to their own architecture.