Reply To: Meltdown and Spectre

You are right: we expect distros to be in genAsm and to be specialized to the actual target at install time. The chip will ship with a specializer in ROM with the BIOS. Nothing in the hardware stops the user from writing his own specializer, for whatever benefit or bugs that brings. For that matter, nothing in the hardware stops the user from writing his own genAsm. Subjects such as safe languages are matters of policy, above the architecture, and must be enforced by software. The Mill with its clean protection model offers an excellent platform for such things, but we as a hardware company do not expect to provide them ourselves.