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Pentium F00F Bug
The Pentium F00F bug is a design flaw in the majority of Intel Pentium, Pentium MMX, and Pentium OverDrive processors (all in the P5 microarchitecture). Discovered in 1997, it can result in the processor ceasing to function until the computer is physically rebooted. The bug has been circumvented through operating system updates. The name is shorthand for F0 0F C7 C8, the hexadecimal encoding of one offending instruction. More formally, the bug is called the ''invalid operand with locked CMPXCHG8B instruction bug''. Description In the x86 architecture, the byte sequence F0 0F C7 C8 represents the instruction lock cmpxchg8b eax (locked compare and exchange of 8 bytes in register EAX). The bug also applies to opcodes ending in C9 through CF, which specify register operands other than EAX. The F0 0F C7 C8 instruction does not require any special privileges. This instruction encoding is invalid. The cmpxchg8b instruction compares the value in the EDX and EAX registers with an 8- ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 series of instruction sets, the instruction sets found in most personal computers (PCs). Incorporated in Delaware, Intel ranked No. 45 in the 2020 ''Fortune'' 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue for nearly a decade, from 2007 to 2016 fiscal years. Intel supplies microprocessors for computer system manufacturers such as Acer, Lenovo, HP, and Dell. Intel also manufactures motherboard chipsets, network interface controllers and integrated circuits, flash memory, graphics chips, embedded processors and other devices related to communications and computing. Intel (''int''egrated and ''el''ectronics) was founded on July 18, 1968, by semiconductor pioneers Gordon Moore (of Moore's law) and Robert Noyce ( ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cyrix Coma Bug
The Cyrix coma bug is a design flaw in Cyrix 6x86 (introduced in 1996), 6x86L, and early 6x86MX processors that allows a non-privileged program to hang the computer. Discovery According to Andrew Balsa, around the time of the discovery of the F00F bug on Intel Pentium, Serguei Shtyliov from Moscow found a flaw in a Cyrix processor while developing an IDE disk driver in assembly language. Alexandr Konosevich, from Omsk, further researched the bug and coauthored an article with Uwe Post in the German technology magazine ''c't'', calling it the "hidden CLI bug" (CLI is the instruction that disables interrupts in the x86 architecture). Balsa, as a member on the Linux kernel mailing list, confirmed that the following C program (which uses inline x86-specific assembly language) could be compiled and run by an unprivileged user: unsigned char c = ; int main() Execution of this program renders the processor completely useless until it is rebooted, as it enters an infinite loop ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Meltdown (security Vulnerability)
Meltdown is one of the two original transient execution CPU vulnerabilities (the other being Spectre). Meltdown affects Intel x86 microprocessors, IBM POWER processors, and some ARM-based microprocessors. It allows a rogue process to read all memory, even when it is not authorized to do so. Meltdown affects a wide range of systems. At the time of disclosure (2018), this included all devices running any but the most recent and patched versions of iOS, Linux, macOS, or Windows. Accordingly, many servers and cloud services were impacted, as well as a potential majority of smart devices and embedded devices using ARM-based processors (mobile devices, smart TVs, printers and others), including a wide range of networking equipment. A purely software workaround to Meltdown has been assessed as slowing computers between 5 and 30 percent in certain specialized workloads, although companies responsible for software correction of the exploit reported minimal impact from general benchmark ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pentium FDIV Bug
The Pentium FDIV bug is a hardware bug affecting the floating-point unit (FPU) of the early Intel Pentium processors. Because of the bug, the processor would return incorrect binary floating point results when dividing certain pairs of high-precision numbers. The bug was discovered in 1994 by Thomas R. Nicely, a professor of mathematics at Lynchburg College. Missing values in a lookup table used by the FPU's floating-point division algorithm led to calculations acquiring small errors. While these errors would in most use-cases only occur rarely and result in small deviations from the correct output values, in certain circumstances the errors can occur frequently and lead to more significant deviations. The severity of the FDIV bug is debated. Though rarely encountered by most users (''Byte'' magazine estimated that 1 in 9 billion floating point divides with random parameters would produce inaccurate results), both the flaw and Intel's initial handling of the matter were heavily ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Denial-of-service Attack
In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connected to a network. Denial of service is typically accomplished by flooding the targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled. In a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack), the incoming traffic flooding the victim originates from many different sources. More sophisticated strategies are required to mitigate this type of attack, as simply attempting to block a single source is insufficient because there are multiple sources. A DoS or DDoS attack is analogous to a group of people crowding the entry door of a shop, making it hard for legitimate customers to enter, thus disrupting trade. Criminal perpetrators of DoS attacks oft ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
CMPXCHG8B
x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit version of the x86 instruction set, first released in 1999. It introduced two new modes of operation, 64-bit mode and compatibility mode, along with a new 4-level paging mode. With 64-bit mode and the new paging mode, it supports vastly larger amounts of virtual memory and physical memory than was possible on its 32-bit predecessors, allowing programs to store larger amounts of data in memory. x86-64 also expands general-purpose registers to 64-bit, and expands the number of them from 8 (some of which had limited or fixed functionality, e.g. for stack management) to 16 (fully general), and provides numerous other enhancements. Floating-point arithmetic is supported via mandatory SSE2-like instructions, and x87/ MMX style registers are generally not used (but still available even in 64-bit mode); instead, a set of 16 vector registers, 128 bits each, is used. (Each register can store one or two double-precision ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Copy-on-write
Copy-on-write (COW), sometimes referred to as implicit sharing or shadowing, is a resource-management technique used in computer programming to efficiently implement a "duplicate" or "copy" operation on modifiable resources. If a resource is duplicated but not modified, it is not necessary to create a new resource; the resource can be shared between the copy and the original. Modifications must still create a copy, hence the technique: the copy operation is deferred until the first write. By sharing resources in this way, it is possible to significantly reduce the resource consumption of unmodified copies, while adding a small overhead to resource-modifying operations. In virtual memory management Copy-on-write finds its main use in sharing the virtual memory of operating system processes, in the implementation of the fork system call. Typically, the process does not modify any memory and immediately executes a new process, replacing the address space entirely. Thus, it would be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Triple Fault
On the x86 computer architecture, a triple fault is a special kind of exception generated by the CPU when an exception occurs while the CPU is trying to invoke the double fault exception handler, which itself handles exceptions occurring while trying to invoke a regular exception handler. x86 processors beginning with the 80286 will cause a shutdown cycle to occur when a triple fault is encountered. This typically causes the motherboard hardware to initiate a CPU reset, which, in turn, causes the whole computer to reboot. Possible causes of triple faults Triple faults indicate a problem with the operating system kernel or device drivers. In modern operating systems, a triple fault is typically caused by a buffer overflow or underflow in a device driver which writes over the interrupt descriptor table (IDT). If the IDT is corrupted, when the next interrupt happens, the processor will be unable to call either the needed interrupt handler or the double fault handler because the de ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Double Fault
On the x86 architecture, a double fault exception occurs if the processor encounters a problem while trying to service a pending interrupt or exception. An example situation when a double fault would occur is when an interrupt is triggered but the segment in which the interrupt handler resides is invalid. If the processor encounters a problem when calling the double fault handler, a triple fault is generated and the processor shuts down. As double faults can only happen due to kernel bugs, they are rarely caused by user space programs in a modern protected mode operating system, unless the program somehow gains kernel access (some viruses and also some low-level DOS programs). Other processors like PowerPC or SPARC generally save state to predefined and reserved machine registers. A double fault will then be a situation where another exception happens while the processor is still using the contents of these registers to process the exception. SPARC processors have four levels of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Denial-of-service Attack
In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connected to a network. Denial of service is typically accomplished by flooding the targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled. In a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack), the incoming traffic flooding the victim originates from many different sources. More sophisticated strategies are required to mitigate this type of attack, as simply attempting to block a single source is insufficient because there are multiple sources. A DoS or DDoS attack is analogous to a group of people crowding the entry door of a shop, making it hard for legitimate customers to enter, thus disrupting trade. Criminal perpetrators of DoS attacks oft ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Halt And Catch Fire (computing)
In computer engineering, Halt and Catch Fire, known by the assembly mnemonic HCF, is an idiom referring to a computer machine code instruction that causes the computer's central processing unit (CPU) to cease meaningful operation, typically requiring a restart of the computer. It originally referred to a fictitious instruction in IBM System/360 computers (introduced in 1964), making a joke about its numerous non-obvious instruction mnemonics. With the advent of the MC6800 (introduced in 1974), a design flaw was discovered by programmers. Due to incomplete opcode decoding, two illegal opcodes, 0x9D and 0xDD, will cause the program counter on the processor to increment endlessly, which locks the processor until reset. Those codes have been unofficially named HCF. During the design process of the MC6802, engineers originally planned to remove this instruction, but kept it as-is for testing purposes. As a result, HCF was officially recognized as a real instruction. Later, HCF beca ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stepping Level
In integrated circuits, the stepping level or revision level is a version number that refers to the introduction or revision of one or more photolithographic photomasks within the set of photomasks that is used to pattern an integrated circuit. The term originated from the name of the equipment ( "steppers") that exposes the photoresist to light. Integrated circuits have two primary classes of mask sets: firstly, "base" layers that are used to build the structures, such as transistors, that comprise circuit logic and, secondly, "metal" layers that connect the circuit logic. Typically, when an integrated circuit manufacturer such as Intel or AMD produces a new stepping (i.e. a revision to the masks), it is because it has found bugs in the logic, has made improvements to the design that permit faster processing, has found a way to increase yield or improve the "bin splits" (i.e. create faster transistors and thus faster CPUs), has improved maneuverability to more easily identify ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
