Summer scorcher

Farm status
Intel GPUs
All off

Nvidia GPUs
All off

Raspberry Pi’s
All running Einstein BRP work


Meltdown and Spectre bugs
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last week you could not fail to hear about the two bugs dubbed Meltdown and Spectre. Meltdown is caused by the CPU doing speculative execution and effects all Intel processors made in the last 10 years as well as some recent ARM processors. The speculative execution is a feature the chip designers add to prevent the CPU waiting to load instructions, however it also has this nasty side effect.

Yesterday we got patched kernels for the Meltdown bug, both Linux and Windows. The Raspberry Pi’s don’t use the effected ARM processors so they didn’t need kernel updates. I spent some time applying it to all computers.

There have already been some lawsuits filed against Intel. There could be some performance impact caused by the patch but I have not been able to tell how much yet. Spectre has not been patched as its much harder to counter. It effects AMD, ARM and Intel (and possibly other) CPU brands.

I haven’t seen patches for the Drobo and I expect a number of mobile phones and tablets will need patching, a lot of them use the effected ARM processors.


Other farm news
Speaking of meltdown is was like that today with the temperature getting up to 38 degrees C here so I had everything off until things cooled down. Even now the only computers I have running are the Raspberry Pi’s.

I do, when its cool enough, run the main crunchers overnight. I am still trying to get Asteroids and Einstein up to the 50 million credits that Seti has accumulated.