Hardware

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All things related to technology hardware, with a focus on computing hardware.

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To study how chips really work, MIT researchers built their own operating system (news.mit.edu)

submitted 3 days ago by Rekall_Incorporated@piefed.social to c/hardware@lemmy.world

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The new "Fractal" operating system kernel, developed at MIT, gives researchers a clearer look at how computer chips work internally. It was used to study the branch predictors inside Apple's M1 processor, where it revealed a potential vulnerability to major speculative attacks.

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[–] GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago

ARM and x86 are instruction sets, not architectures. Intel chips and AMD chips can be different from each other, too, just as different ARM processors can be different from each other.

But all modern processors improve performance by engaging in speculative execution, where they run code or calculations before they're necessary, to have the results on hand in case it's needed, or rolled back if it turns out it's not needed after all. The specific methods differ from vendor to vendor and chip to chip.

Exploring these things is important because sometimes speculative execution leaks data beyond the process that's entitled to view it, and there have been computer vulnerabilities exploiting this (see Spectre, Meltdown, etc.).