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by fc417fc802 89 days ago
Aren't all of them microcoded? Some years back root was achieved on a line of intel processors and new instructions implemented as proof of concept. There's an academic paper, citation not immediately to hand.
2 comments

Some instructions are microcoded but others take the fast path and avoid the microcode sequencer. Can't patch the latter in microcode RAM.
I saw the paper from Google last year and thought something in it aligned with not everything running through the microcode engine, though I could be wrong.
Might well be the case. I don't think I'm familiar with the paper you're referring to; any chance of at least a vague description?
Can’t find the pdf, but it’s all related to the zentool stuff:

https://github.com/google/security-research/blob/master/pocs...

Tavis spells it out there pretty quickly:

“ The simplest instructions (add, sub, mov, etc) are all implemented in hardware. The more complicated instructions like rdrand, fpatan and cmpxchg are microcoded. You can think of them as a bit like calling into a library of functions written in that RISC-like code.”