Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by toast0 275 days ago
Didn't they have the F00F bug? (Thanks, I keep misremembering) How much more Pentium do you want?
2 comments
oakwhiz 275 days ago
No, the Quarks did not have the f00f bug, that would have been funny though.
link
numpad0 275 days ago
Didn't they have issues with `LOCK CMPXCHG`(not the 8B)? This is out of my depth and I am not sure, but it sounds similar to the f00f bug.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quark#Segfault_bug

link
neerajsi 275 days ago
Yes, they did have the bug with the lock prefix. IOT people at Microsoft got NT booting on the Quark and we ran into that problem. I wound up writing a small tool to patch out all the lock prefixes.
link
accrual 275 days ago
I believe the F00F bug was patched out pretty quickly in the Pentium's B2 stepping. Nevertheless, some OSs still have mitigations if they detect an affected CPU (e.g. OpenBSD).
link
epcoa 275 days ago
It wasn’t even discovered until 1997, so no that wasn’t exactly early in the Pentium lifecycle at all. There were multiple models and millions of devices affected.
link