Re: Meltdown / Spectre

[Adonay Felipe Nogueira <adfeno@hyperbola.info>]

I don't know if this serves as guidance as to if microcode is functional
or not, but from [1] I quote:

#+BEGIN_QUOTE

However, there is an exception for secondary embedded processors. The
exception applies to software delivered inside auxiliary and low-level
processors and FPGAs, within which software installation is not intended
after the user obtains the product. This can include, for instance,
microcode inside a processor, firmware built into an I/O device, or the
gate pattern of an FPGA. The software in such secondary processors does
not count as product software.

#+END_QUOTE

My (perhaps uninformed) opinion is that it's functional data, but not
the sort of "functional" that every human would be allowed to modify
after it was first written.

[1] <https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/criteria>.

2018-01-10T01:36:18-0800 Chris Marusich wrote:
> According to the user named _4of7 in the #libreboot channel of the
> Freenode IRC network, the email list development@libreboot.org is down.
> So the Libreboot maintainers have probably not seen this email thread.
>
> According to _4of7, currently the best way to contact the Libreboot
> maintainers is IRC.  It would probably be best to ask there.  If you get
> a response, please don't forget to update us here on this thread!
>
> When I asked in #freenode today, _4of7 responded as follows:
>
>   <_4of7> There's not much we can do from the Libreboot side, but there are
>   <_4of7> mitigations on kernel side... since it's exploitable from javascript
>   <_4of7> you could also e.g. not run JavaScript. specing on #libreboot IRC had
>   <_4of7> the idea to run Firefox without the JIT enabled - we both tried to
>   <_4of7> compile the latest ESR however, with --disable-ion, and it segfaulted.
>   <_4of7> I tried to build ff 45esr instead, but that build failed.
>
> I'm not sure who _4of7 is, so I don't know if they speak for the
> Libreboot project.
>
>
> Does the GNU Project have a policy regarding this sort of thing?  I
> wasn't able to find any articles on gnu.org that discuss it.
>
> If no such policy exists, then should this topic be discussed somewhere
> like gnu-system-discuss@gnu.org?  I don't know where discussions like
> this normally take place within the GNU project.  It's definitely a
> discussion worth having, though.

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