Encryption-breaking, password-leaking bug in many AMD CPUs could take months to fix

Lanky_Pomegranate530@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 589 points –
Encryption-breaking, password-leaking bug in many AMD CPUs could take months to fix
arstechnica.com
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Linux has a merged mitigation so when the new kernel comes out Linux users will be safe

Looks like I'm getting the final kick to Linux on my main gaming PC.

Welcome to the club! We're dozens here!

Highly recommend Pop OS! It's been very reliable. I haven't had anything this steady since Mac OS when I was just doing programming. I tried to go from Mac to Alienware for personal computing and it was terrible, windows blue screened almost once a week if not once every four days.

Switched to Pop OS, enabled Proton in steams preferences for gaming, and it was completely steady. Only thing that doesn't work is the hibernate. Which isn't a super big deal to me.

I'd actually say everything has been a better experience than windows. Lutris and pop store have a large variety of games and apps. For example lutris supports GOG and probably epic games. It feels like it's everything I'd want without the shitty user interfaces and lack of crashes.

on my main gaming PC

good luck with that

I know it's not the best, but Proton has come a long, long way. I can play D4, Monster Hunter, factorio, lots of stuff.

I've been testing the waters with my steam deck. There are some hiccups, but almost everything I want to play can be done with proton.

It is really fantastic. With steam almost all the games i bother playing just works. Deleted the windows partition years ago.
Just have to check the community forum how well it works before buying. Or just get a refund if it does not work.

I know it's not the best

Didn't pay thousands for top of the line ryzen and nvidia gear for "not the best" gaming situation.

Linux falls short on two major fronts, less idiot proof, less gamer friendly, and that's Windows' largest market shares, idiots and gamers.

It's almost issue free with the exception of the publishers explicitly blocking it because it doesn't allow them to add a rootkit to your system.

Lmao, most games have better performance on linux so you can't claim it's not the best

If you use this guide to mount the Windows drives you can run it and Linux side by side. It works just as good as Windows these days for 90% of games. You can add games downloaded from unofficial sites to Steam as a "Non-steam game" and it works. Installing Nvidia drivers on Mint is easier than Windows, there's a built in utility.

Do you know if that works for epic games and heroic launcher as well?

There's another launcher that I'm forgetting the name of that will launch Epic and GoG games. Following that proton guide should make NTFS (windows) drives usable for anything in Linux though. I can boot games downloaded from "alternate sites" if I add them to steam as "non steam games" regardless of how the drive is mounted.

There's still the issue of overhead and such. Like I want to ditch windows forever, but Linux is just not 100% there yet with gaming. It's very close though.

I have yet to find a game that doesn't run

At this point I don't even check before buying

There hasn't been a single game I've struggled to run in the last few months on proton. I haven't had a windows PC in like a year ish or more?

I play games heavily too.

Try it out sometime if your setup isn't extremely niche and maybe you'll find it to be accommodating.

The weirdest things I've had to do are click a box in steam to enable proton usage and reinstall something in Lutris for Battle.net on world of warcraft.

when the new kernel comes out Linux users will be safe

It’s going to take a lot longer than that for most distros to move to latest upstream. This specific fix might be pulled in as a hotfix if you’re lucky, but it still takes time. The latest Ubuntu LTS is on 5.15, for example, which was released in October 2021. Debian Bookworm, which just released last month, uses 6.1 from December 2022.

Critical security fixes are backported. There where a lot of kernels released yesterday that had the fix. For 5.15, 5.15.122 was released with the zenbleed mitigation.

5.15.122 was released with the zen bleed mitigation

But Ubuntu users (for example) won’t get that automatically. Canonical still has to pull the upstream release, run validation, and roll out a patch. It will probably be speedy, but still on the order of several weeks before people see it by default.

This is exactly the kind of thing that gets backported to stable LTS distros tho. The kernel Major.Minor is just the base - it doesn't tell the whole story.

Right - I was just objecting to the suggestion that once upstream has the fix, “Linux users will be safe”.

Which version? I got 6.4.6 a few mins ago in arch.

In seriousness: it's in 6.4.6, 6.1.41 and a bunch of other kernel versions released yesterday.