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Posts: 915 | Thanked: 3,209 times | Joined on Jan 2011 @ Germany
#268
Can we have any information on Purisms take on Spectre (CVE-2017-5753, CVE-2017-5715) with regards to the Librem 5 please?
Purism's official statement so far only covers x86. [1] (Quite frankly, it doesn't even do that very well - little data, lots of buzz.)
ARM says, the Cortex A9 (i.MX6) is vulnerable, while the A53/A72 (i.MX8) is not. [2]

To me that's an even stronger argument in favour of the i.MX8 over the i.MX6 than the higher performace.
I'm very close to making the fundamental decision of never buying any device again that doesn't adress Spectre (and Meltdown) in hardware, as I have way to many of them currently floating around that don't do that.

(btw: Also the A8 in our N900s is vulnerable, but given our general situation, that's not really much of a deal. [3])

Edit:
Correction: According to ARM, the A72 is vuilnerable, so if an i.MX8 with A72 cores (i.MX 8QuadMax, i.MX 8QuadPlus [4]) would be installed in the Librem 5, one would have to make sure, these cores are not used.
The safer approach would probably be to use just a basic i.MX8 wiithout A72 cores.


[1] https://puri.sm/posts/meltdown-spect...cure-hardware/
[2] https://developer.arm.com/support/security-update
[3] http://www.kroah.com/log/blog/2018/0...ltdown-status/
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I.MX#i.MX_8_series

Last edited by sulu; 2018-01-09 at 22:43.
 

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