Mill Computing, Inc. Forums The Mill Architecture Meltdown and Spectre Reply To: Meltdown and Spectre

Symmetry
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Post count: 28

I think there would be NaRs involved on the Mill, at a guess. When a conventional processor speculates a load to an invalid address it has to suppress the fault until it knows whether the speculation was correct or else it has triggered a fault that it should not have only through its own failure rather than the codes. The Mill doesn’t have to suppress returning a NaR in this case because it would be invisible if the execution is later rolled back as false speculation. And since the speculating thread never has its hands on data from outside what it should be able to access there doesn’t seem to be any danger of data exfiltration. Well, I can imagine attacks along these lines that would let someone figure out which hidden addresses are in caches or main memory but not access the contents of the data at those addresses.

This is speculation, though, so maybe I should just wait for the authorities to answer. 🙂