Linux kernel dev Greg Kroah-Hartman reckons Intel Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) – also known as hyper-threading – should be disabled for security due to MDS (Microarchitectural Data Sampling) bugs. Kroah-Hartman, who was speaking at the Open Source summit in Lyons, has opened up on the subject before. “I gave a talk last year about Spectre and how Linux reacted to it,” he told The Reg. “And then this year it’s about things found since the last talk. It’s more and more of the same types of problems. “These problems are going to be with us for a long time; they’re not going away.” There is another issue, though. “People didn’t realize how we do security updates, the whole CVE mess, and the best practices we need to have. Linux isn’t less secure or more secure than anything else. The problem is: these are bugs in the chips. We fix them in time, we just have to make sure that everybody updates.”
Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/29/intel_disable_hyper_threading_linux_kernel_maintainer/
Submitted by: Arnfried Walbrecht
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