For anyone interested, here are links to the slides and the accompanying white paper.
[Slides] https://millcomputing.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/20...
[White Paper] https://millcomputing.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Sp...
I haven't read the paper yet; hopefully it offers more detail than the talk does because I am still confused about how the Mill avoids cache pollution from speculative loads.
EDIT: Here is my attempt at a summary of the relevant bits of the whitepaper:
The Mill is immune to Meltdown for the same reason AMD et al. are; it does permission checks before loading rather than in parallel and thus the load faults before going to memory.
The Mill is immune to Spectre because "Current Mill configurations will [speculatively] issue, and revoke, a maximum of two instructions. Revocation includes all cache and other micro-architectural side effects."
Neither of those points is covered in the talk. I don't know enough about the subject to judge, but the arguments in the paper seem a bit glib. I'd like to hear from an expert on the subject.
[Slides] https://millcomputing.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/20...
[White Paper] https://millcomputing.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Sp...
I haven't read the paper yet; hopefully it offers more detail than the talk does because I am still confused about how the Mill avoids cache pollution from speculative loads.
EDIT: Here is my attempt at a summary of the relevant bits of the whitepaper:
The Mill is immune to Meltdown for the same reason AMD et al. are; it does permission checks before loading rather than in parallel and thus the load faults before going to memory.
The Mill is immune to Spectre because "Current Mill configurations will [speculatively] issue, and revoke, a maximum of two instructions. Revocation includes all cache and other micro-architectural side effects."
Neither of those points is covered in the talk. I don't know enough about the subject to judge, but the arguments in the paper seem a bit glib. I'd like to hear from an expert on the subject.