Jon Masters
On The Metal
00:00
Discussing firmware bugs and pain in running systems on premises
This chapter delves into a tweet highlighting a technical problem with UEFI pre-boot network stack and DMA causing RAM disk corruption and system challenges. It humorously mentions the frustration of dealing with PC vendors but introduces Oxide Computer Company as a supportive solution for overcoming such technical hurdles.
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Episode notes
You can find Jon on Twitter at https://twitter.com/jonmasters.
Some of the highlights of the show include:
- "Negative Result: Reading Kernel Memory From User Mode" (blog post from July 2017): https://cyber.wtf/2017/07/28/negative-result-reading-kernel-memory-from-user-mode/
- Spectre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(security_vulnerability)
- Meltdown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerability)
- Speculative execution: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/261792-what-is-speculative-execution
- ICL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Computers_Limited
- Hacker News front page, January 1st, 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2018-01-01
- Boogie Nights, the death of Little Bill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFX-qfYbHKg
- BBC Micro 6502: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro
- BBC Master: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Master
- Storage Wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_Wars
- PA-8000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PA-8000
- SPARCbook 3000ST: https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/04/01/sparcbook-3000st-the-coolest-90s-laptop-sparc-vintagecomputing-retrocomputing-eckmeister/
- Itanium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium
- McKinley: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Itanium_microprocessors#McKinley_(180_nm)
- Leon Czolgosz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Czolgosz
- Humartia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamartia
- Transmeta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta
- Transmeta Crusoe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta_Crusoe
- Richard (Dick) Sites: https://sites.google.com/site/dicksites/
- Dick Sites, "It's the Memory, Stupid!": http://cva.stanford.edu/classes/cs99s/papers/architects_look_to_future.pdf
- John Crawford: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Crawford_(engineer)
- John Hennessy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_L._Hennessy
- Kernel page-table isolation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_page-table_isolation
- Hot Chips 30 keynote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5XzVF0sAZo
- Panel at Hot Chips 30 keynote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5XzVF0sAZo#t=1h17m
- The Omega Directive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Omega_Directive
- L1TF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreshadow_(security_vulnerability)
- iDRACula: https://www.servethehome.com/idracula-vulnerability-impacts-millions-of-legacy-dell-emc-servers/
- MDS, including Zombieload and RIDL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microarchitectural_Data_Sampling
- Heartbleed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed
- Lazy FPU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazy_FP_state_restore
- Pentium FDIV bug: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug
- Pentium F00F bug: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_F00F_bug
- Hyper-threading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading
- Acorn Archimedes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes
- Acorn RISC machine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture
- RISC-V: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V
- ARM Thumb: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Thumb
- ARMv8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#ARMv8-A
- Chris Celio et al., "Avoiding ISA Bloat with Macro-Op Fusion for RISC-V": https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.02318
- Chris Celio, "ISA Shootout": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ii_pEXKKYUg
- BeagleBoard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeagleBoard
- ARM Ares: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/arm_holdings/microarchitectures/neoverse_n1
- SeaMicro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaMicro
- Calxeda: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calxeda
- AppliedMicro X-Gene: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/apm/x-gene
- UEFI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface
- Broadcom Vulcan: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/cavium/microarchitectures/vulcan
- Savaged by Systemd: An Erotic Unix Encounter by Michael Warren Lucas: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36190710-savaged-by-systemd
- Coreboot kexec'ing Linux: https://twitter.com/hugelgupf/status/1158466881373630464
- IOMMU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input%E2%80%93output_memory_management_unit
- Slackware: https://en.wikipedi...
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