Using enterprise class hardware shows once again that you get what you paid for.
A new issue came up in the last days describing attacks against Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) modules that are already susceptible to Rowhammer-style attacks. At the end of the day these security problems are not microprocessor-specific, they leverage known issues in DRAM memory. These attacks only impact DDR4 and DDR3 memory modules, and older generations DDR2 and DDR1 memory modules are not vulnerable to these attacks.
Oracle published an advisory that reported that older and current servers using its SPARC and x86 CPUs aren’t expected to be susceptible to RAMBleed:
All current and many older families of Oracle x86 (X5, X6, X7, X8, E1) and Oracle SPARC servers (S7, T7, T8, M7, M8) employing DDR4 DIMMs are not expected to be impacted by RAMBleed. This is because Oracle only employs DDR4 DIMMs that have implemented the Target Row Refresh (TRR) defense mechanism against RowHammer. Oracle’s memory suppliers have stated that these implementations have been designed to be effective against RowHammer.
Just to remember once again… 😉
Meltdown@SPARC – NO
Spectre@SPARC – OK – not all variants (HW_BTI & OS fixed)
Foreshadow@SPARC – NO
ZombieLoad@SPARC – NO
RAMBleed@SPARC – OK – very difficult based on TRR DIMMs
Working in an enterprise data center and securing your business critical services might be easier than you thought… work with Solaris on SPARC!
No RISC no fun
