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by jssmith 2986 days ago
This view on sharing hardware seems too pessimistic to me. Strong isolation should be achievable when it is the design objective and and priority.

On the end-user/device side, JavaScript has proven that sharing hardware with untrusted code is just too valuable to give up, and a similar dynamic continues to play out in the cloud.

I'm also happy whenever a headline brings attention to these types of problems because I believe we can fix them.

1 comments

>> This view on sharing hardware seems too pessimistic to me. Strong isolation should be achievable when it is the design objective and and priority.

I think it's spot-on. Isolation has never been the top priority. Regardless of the priority, if one simply views all "untrusted code" as "code created by my enemy" the solution becomes clear - don't run it.

>> JavaScript has proven that sharing hardware with untrusted code is just too valuable to give up...

This is something I strongly disagree with. Javascript has become a common way to handle things but it's not the only way. In my opinion it's the lazy way - most people want to just use what's there and common rather than solve a few problems.

>> I'm also happy whenever a headline brings attention to these types of problems because I believe we can fix them.

One thing I'm seeing is that CPUs with speculative execution have lower performance/watt and performance/area. So in the cloud space it seem like just going to simpler CPU cores may be a solution (risc-v Esperanto Minions for example). Obviously that's not a solution where single thread performance is critical.