On Saturday 20 March 2010 23:31:58 Randall R Schulz wrote:
On Saturday March 20 2010, Anton Aylward wrote:
Anders Johansson said the following on 03/20/2010 02:54 PM:
On Sat, 2010-03-20 at 12:43 -0400, Anton Aylward wrote:
Aye, and with that comes a whole new raft of hazards and problems, including many to do with the various aspects of security.-
Security aspects of SMP?
Apart from certain race condition exploits possibly being easier to achieve, I have no idea what that would be. Could you expand a little on what you mean?
Right now its open-ended.
Only if software development continues to be done with the tools of the pre-multi-CPU era. I think software Darwinism will make quick work of those efforts.
This whole conversation is slightly surreal. When I went to university in the mid 90s, we looked at SMP issues, and I refuse to believe that it has become less common since then. This isn't anything new. SMP has been with us for a very long time, and it is only getting more common. Even windows programmers have been exposed to SMP for at least a decade. I seriously don't think this is a problem we need to be overly concerned with. Yes, there are ongoing research efforts to get more performance out of SMP, but in the 12 years since I was left uni, I have not seen any significant security issues that came from running on more than one CPU, so I will choose to ignore this risk for now. Yes there are deadlock issues and similar headaches, but I seriously don't see any security problems there Anders -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org