Date: Sat, 8 Nov 1997 19:42:51 -0800 (PST) From: Howard Lew <digital@www2.shoppersnet.com> To: Tony Kimball <alk@subtle.east.sun.com> Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Newest Pentium bug (fatal) Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.91.971108192731.14766A-100000@www2.shoppersnet.com> In-Reply-To: <199711082030.OAA17326@pobox.com>
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On Sat, 8 Nov 1997, Tony Kimball wrote: > ! Compared with the aforementioned > ! floating-point bug, this seems like a much bigger deal. > > No, the FP bug was infinitely worse, because it would silently give > wrong answers. You could crash the Thai Bhat by accident with an old > Pentium chip. In this case, the machine is locked -- no one is going > to misinterpret that. Indeed, a non-broken compiler would never emit > the code. This is no worse than running Windows on a computer without > the bug, right? In both cases, pathological code can lock the > machine. And millions run Windows voluntarily -- or at least don't > try hard enough to not run Windows in order to overcome the coercivity > of the environment. > For Windows users this bug should not be much of a problem unless viruses start popping up taking advantage of the bug. For FreeBSD it is not very comforting to know that any misbehaving user can lock up your shell machine, but in a controlled environment this should not be a problem.
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