On Sun, 25 Mar 2018 09:10:36 +1000 jamesd@echeque.com wrote:
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.
OK, I'll assume at least it's better than the broadcom/raspberry stuff.
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.
Yeah put some optimizations on the chip, so as to pretend that chip designers are creating 'value' and charge for it. Makes sense. From the point of view of corporate thieves. Regardless, as far as I understand it, the problem is not speculative execution per se, but shitty implementations that don't take security into account. Because the engineers responsible for them are incompetent or/and corrupt.
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.