RE: Meltdown and spectre

Oracle has confirmed to us that SPARC CPUs are not affected.

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Lothar Flatz Sent: Friday, January 05, 2018 8:48 AM
To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: Re: Meltdown and spectre

Anyone knows about Sparc?
Are they affected?

Am 05.01.2018 um 14:37 schrieb Mark W. Farnham: This also poses what I think is a relevant question for folks who place their physical RDBMS server(s) securely and only have privileged logons anyway. (You really can’t stop a fully privileged account from viewing memory or any other resources anyway and only in memory encryption can frustrate that if a bad actor has gained a privileged access to a server.)

So, will there be an “insecure” patch to skip the overhead and rely on server access control?

Then we can have a fresh round of the debate about whether “physical” or “virtual” is faster with the playing field thus tilted significantly in favor of “physical.”

I also wonder for “virtual” servers whether this could be merely a “hypervisor” patch (which in ring security theory dating back to the 1970’s could establish a memory address bounded area at the privileged account layer (which should be a heckuva lot cheaper than a wrapper on every “syscall.”)

DTSS is lookin’ pretty good right now. Still it was our own fault for not explaining clearly to enough to management that 100 million (plus) copies at $39.95 each was more than 12 copies at $10 million each. Sigh.

mwf

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org<mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org> [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Niall Litchfield Sent: Thursday, January 04, 2018 10:58 AM To: andrew.kerber_at_gmail.com<mailto:andrew.kerber_at_gmail.com> Cc: fmh; ORACLE-L
Subject: Re: Meltdown and spectre

There absolutely should be an OEL patch for this - for the RH kernel they'll probably take upstream - for UEK I'd expect an Oracle patch. I'd expect Oracle shops to be regression testing to determine the likely impact on RDBMS (and java app for that matter) performance.

On Thu, Jan 4, 2018 at 3:40 PM, Andrew Kerber <andrew.kerber_at_gmail.com<mailto:andrew.kerber_at_gmail.com>> wrote: I was wondering the same thing. But I dont think its up to Oracle to patch this, its going to be at the OS and firmware level. But everything I read says that its going be a huge performance hit, anywhere from 10-50%, and the higher end will be on IO bound systems.

On Thu, Jan 4, 2018 at 9:33 AM, Fred Habash <fmhabash_at_gmail.com<mailto:fmhabash_at_gmail.com>> wrote: Checked Oracle security bulletins but didn't find anything related. Did Oracle release an official statement for these vulnerabilities at least for the RDBMS and OEL.

Thanks

--

Andrew W. Kerber

'If at first you dont succeed, dont take up skydiving.'

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Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
http://www.orawin.info

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http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l Received on Fri Jan 05 2018 - 15:24:05 CET