Subject: Re: pentium bug
From: [email-masked] (Alex)

8 Nov 1997 20:48:09 -0800
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
References: <[email-masked]>
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To: Joshua Weage <[email-masked]>
Cc: root <[email-masked]>, [email-masked]

On Sat, 8 Nov 1997, Joshua Weage wrote:

> > This means that anybody can crash anytime any OS that runs under a
> Pentium CPU.
> > As the poster said, no special permissions are needed, the pentium runs
> under
> > ring 3 permissions!!!! user space
> > 
> > This means that no secure system can ever be built that uses the pentium
> CPU. No
> > protected system. The OS receives NO TRAP!!!
> 
> 	So what is the problem with a hard reboot?  Your system will not be
> insecure, it will just crash.  The same thing can be done to a sun
> workstation, not quite as quick, but it is possible to force a hard reboot
> with no other available options to get the system back up.

With filesystems other than FAT{16|32}, this can lead to data loss due to 
filesystem corruption, which is a problem.  On any system this can lead to
loss of whatever data is in ram, before your system crashes, on a server
like system this can also force costly downtime.

- alex

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