Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sbose78 3544 days ago
The bug report has way too less information for folks of other disciplines ( inside CS ) to understand.

Could someone please provide a context?

1 comments

The x86 architecture has a large number of optional instruction sets. One of these, AES-NI, provides accelerated AES instructions. Another one, AVX, is a collection of general-purpose vector instructions. These were announced at the same time, but it seems like a large number of Intel's low-end CPUs (Celerons & Pentiums) only implement AES-NI.

Firefox's current implementation of the AES-GCM encryption mode uses AVX instructions. The bug report is a submission of a modified implementation that avoids them.