IT... Computing....

DaveRattlehead said:

We were lucky for it, as we came back by train! A few people who came with us to Lyon had to look for an alternative...Crowdstrike

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I can imagine yourself (or myself) helping the folks at the airport boot to safe mode and fix the issue so that their flight program can be back online.

PluMGMK said:

Oh wow… He must have been like, "Oh God, it happened again!"

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Now all we need is to find out that the same lowly engineer was also the one responsible last time.

Yeah, I also felt that the criticism directed at Microsoft over this was quite unfair. I mean, Crowdstrike is not bundled with Windows now, is it?

Some people pointed out that Windows should do a better job of preventing the OS from crashing because of the programs running on it (in that case my understanding is that Crowdstrike was attempting to access protected memory addresses with administrator privileges), but surely this must be a little more complicated than that. I'm curious, how does Linux deal with this, for example?

Apparently something very similar happened with a CrowdStrike update on Linux last year or so. It's difficult to prevent this sort of thing when you have third party Ring0 modules being loaded into the kernel. One solution would be to automatically disable any recently updated modules after repeated failed boots, but that could also probably be exploited by malware to force-disable security software.

So Intel confirmed serious issues with their Intel Core Gen 13 and 14! Hard times are coming for them...

I can't see myself going back to Intel anytime soon even if things like this didn't happen. Both my PC and laptop have Ryzen CPUs. I wonder how much of a setback this is going to be for Intel though.

You mean this? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/202...-problem-making-13th-and-14th-gen-cpus-crash/ So the microcode was jacking up the voltage too much – damn, that ain't good…

In fairness, my 4th-gen Core i7 survived about four years of too much voltage (I think I wrote about this here before) and still seems to be going after another six years of normal operation (touch wood ) but I guess these 7-nm parts are even more fragile than my 22-nm baby…

My son is quite worried about his i9-13900K being affected. Guess he's just a hypochondriac about hardware as he is about himself.

The Gigabyte board in that PC has a beta BIOS, which seems to have the "Intel Default Settings" enabled by default, which should alleviate the problem. Waiting for Intel's promised microcode update in August, to update the BIOS again.

PluMGMK said:

Apparently something very similar happened with a CrowdStrike update on Linux last year or so. It's difficult to prevent this sort of thing when you have third party Ring0 modules being loaded into the kernel. One solution would be to automatically disable any recently updated modules after repeated failed boots, but that could also probably be exploited by malware to force-disable security software.

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Looks like Microsoft is partially blaming the outage on a 2009 agreement with EU regulators which forced them to give third-party security providers kernel-level access to Windows.

DaveRattlehead said:

So Intel confirmed serious issues with their Intel Core Gen 13 and 14! Hard times are coming for them...

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Yeah, especially when they were pointing fingers at the motherboard vendors early on about driving their CPUs too hard out of spec, despite the specs Intel lists out are not even consistent and clear.

Which makes Intel look even worse when you hear about enterprise solutions that run those 13th and 14th Gen chips in gaming servers experiencing issues, and that's with actual server motherboards which are very reserved on power delivery with no actual overclocking in place.


It's a huge mess, needless to say, especially when the whole issue with some of the warranty issues has gone a bit all over the place. I do hope in the end, consumers effected get made right, but that's still going to be a difficult task, since there's likely a lot of people unaware of this problem.

Hunchman801 said:

Looks like Microsoft is partially blaming the outage on a 2009 agreement with EU regulators which forced them to give third-party security providers kernel-level access to Windows.

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I felt this had a decent explanation regarding the problems with loading the driver to have kernel-level access in Windows as well:

It's pretty scary to see how easy it is to bring down a ton of systems when you don't test something thoroughly before releasing... I've heard about some cases of companies that use bit locker... had the keys stored on a machine that was also taken down by the bad update. Good luck getting into any of those encrypted machines just to apply the manual fix. Yikes.

Oh Intel, what have you done...

I am glad I am using Ryzen in both my laptop and PC.

Speaking of Ryzen... Linux can run Windows games better on the newer Ryzen CPUs than the same Windows games can natively, so there's some funny weirdness going on with Windows regarding these CPUs currently.

Hoodcom said:

I felt this had a decent explanation regarding the problems with loading the driver to have kernel-level access in Windows as well:

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That was very informative, thanks for sharing!

The BootStart driver crashing is indeed a killer thing, very hard to debug. Fortunately, most cases can be worked around in safe mode, like here. In situations where even that won't work, booting from a Windows installation media, and manipulating the local hard drive or registry hive offline is usually a possibility.

You're welcome, Hunch!

And yeah, especially when there's any problems at kernel level, it's designed to halt everything to protect the system. Since you really don't want to just ignore a severe issue that could cause any mass corruption of data.

It definitely became an IT nightmare for a lot of folks out there. Including some of my IT buddies, one who works for an outfit that serves a large hospital system and another who works for a credit union.

Hoodcom said:

It definitely became an IT nightmare for a lot of folks out there. Including some of my IT buddies, one who works for an outfit that serves a large hospital system and another who works for a credit union.

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I'd be curious to know why they need to run stuff in kernel mode for such use cases though.

DaveRattlehead said:

So Intel confirmed serious issues with their Intel Core Gen 13 and 14! Hard times are coming for them...

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Looks like AMD is coming under fire too...

TechPowerUp said:

A critical security flaw known as "Sinkclose" (CVE-2023-31315) has been identified in all AMD processors dating back to 2006, potentially affecting hundreds of millions of devices worldwide. This vulnerability allows malicious actors to exploit the chip architecture, leading to unauthorized access to sensitive data. Researchers Enrique Nissim and Krzysztof Okupski, researchers from the security firm IOActive, have revealed that the vulnerability can be exploited through various methods, enabling attackers to extract confidential information from affected systems, including passwords and personal data. The issue is especially concerning, given that it is present in all AMD CPUs made in the last 18 years and their widespread use in both consumer and enterprise environments. However, to exploit this vulnerability, an attacker must possess access to system's kernel. Downloading of malware-infused files can trigger it, so general safety measures are recommended.

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Good news for Qualcomm?

Everything is crap.

But honestly I can't really understand why everyone treats the Intel fiasco like something outrageous.

It sounds like "Did you actually forget that overclocking and overvolting can damage CPU long-term? Well, here's a reminder".

(Gross simplification, I know. It was also about the default voltage settings being inadequate and leading to instability)

Ah yeah, I've heard about that one with AMD, it's quite a shame too.

Well, the Intel fiasco is a little outrageous due to the wide-spread potential, but people have overclocked their components for decades without failures at the rate these 13th and 14th gen Intel chips are experiencing on what's supposed to have been stock. Especially in server motherboards that are more reserved.

Ah yes, the AMD Ring0-to-SMM escalation bug. Call me old-fashioned, but I think if you've got malware in Ring0, you're already in a lot of trouble

Honestly though, Intel have really messed this up big time. I guess the whole competition to stay ahead of AMD screwed them over, and they pushed too much while their sillicon lottery clearly isn't able to handle it. It's funny that for years Intel was so far ahead that they literally had purposefully kept everything back at a safe voltage and frequency, where there was so much overclocking headroom. You could see the headroom got smaller and smaller while AMD got their act together with Ryzen, and now they apparently have minus headroom, given that apparently only 20% of them are stable at stock.

EDIT:

dr_st said:

I can't really understand why everyone treats the Intel fiasco like something outrageous.

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