Dear all, that was the question I was pondering about all day today and I tried to read and digest any information I could get.
In the end, I contacted my friend at CERT and proposed the following: - upgrade the heanode/login node (name it how you like) as that one is exposed to the outside world via ssh - do not upgrade the compute nodes for now until we got more information about the impact of the patch(es). It would not be the first time a patch is opening up another can of worms. What I am hoping for is finding a middle way between security and performance. IF the patch(es) are save to apply, I still can roll them out to the compute nodes without loosing too much uptime. IF there is a problem regarding performance it only affects the headnode which I can ignore on that cluster. As always, your mileage will vary, specially as different clusters have different purposes. What I would like to know is: how about compensation? For me that is the same as the VW scandal last year. We, the users, have been deceived. Specially if the 30% performance loss which have been mooted are not special corner cases but are seen often in HPC. Some of the chemistry code I am supporting relies on disc I/O, others on InfiniBand and again other is running entirely in memory. These are my 2 cents. If somebody has a better idea, please let me know. All the best from a rainy and windy London Jörg Am Mittwoch, 3. Januar 2018, 13:56:50 GMT schrieb Remy Dernat: > Hi, > I renamed that thread because IMHO there is a another issue related to that > threat. Should we upgrade our system and lost a significant amount of > XFlops... ? What should be consider : - the risk - your user population > (size / type / average "knowledge" of hacking techs...) - the isolation > level from the outside (internet) > > So here is me question : if this is not confidential, what will you do ? > I would not patch our little local cluster, contrary to all of our other > servers. Indeed, there is another "little" risk. If our strategy is to > always upgrade/patch, in this particular case you can loose many users that > will complain about perfs... So another question : what is your global > strategy about upgrades on your clusters ? Do you upgrade it as often as > you can ? One upgrade every X months (due to the downtime issue) ... ? > > Thanks, > Best regardsRémy. > > -------- Message d'origine --------De : John Hearns via Beowulf > <beowulf@beowulf.org> Date : 03/01/2018 09:48 (GMT+01:00) À : Beowulf > Mailing List <beowulf@beowulf.org> Objet : Re: [Beowulf] Intel CPU design > bug & security flaw - kernel fix imposes performance penalty Thanks Chris. > In the past there have been Intel CPU 'bugs' trumpeted, but generally these > are fixed with a microcode update. This looks different, as it is a > fundamental part of the chips architecture.However the Register article > says: "It allows normal user programs – to discern to some extent the > layout or contents of protected kernel memory areas" I guess the phrase "to > some extent" is the vital one here. Are there any security exploits which > use this information? I guess it is inevitable that one will be engineered > now that this is known about. The question I am really asking is should we > worry about this for real world systems. And I guess tha answer is that if > the kernel developers are worried enough then yes we should be too. > Comments please. > > > > On 3 January 2018 at 06:56, Greg Lindahl <lind...@pbm.com> wrote: > > On Wed, Jan 03, 2018 at 02:46:07PM +1100, Christopher Samuel wrote: > > There appears to be no microcode fix possible and the kernel fix will > > > > incur a significant performance penalty, people are talking about in the > > > > range of 5%-30% depending on the generation of the CPU. :-( > > The performance hit (at least for the current patches) is related to > > system calls, which HPC programs using networking gear like OmniPath > > or Infiniband don't do much of. > > > > -- greg > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing > > To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit > http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
