ZombieLoad on SPARC

And again, after Meltdown, Spectre, and Foreshadow, current SPARC CPUs are also not effected by ZombieLoad…

@ZombieLoad
While programs usually only see their own data, a malicious program can exploit the stuffing buffers to gain secrets that are currently being processed by other running programs. These secrets can be user-level secrets, e.g. browsing history, site content, user keys and passwords, or system-level secrets such as HDD encryption keys.

Oracle’s response to these MDS issues:
“Oracle has determined that Oracle SPARC servers are not affected by these MDS vulnerabilities.”

So these four distinct CVE identifiers will only affect Intel implementations;

CVE-2019-11091: Microarchitectural Data Sampling Uncacheable Memory (MDSUM)
CVE-2018-12126: Microarchitectural Store Buffer Data Sampling (MSBDS)
CVE-2018-12127: Microarchitectural Load Port Data Sampling (MLPDS)
CVE-2018-12130: Microarchitectural Fill Buffer Data Sampling (MFBDS)

That’s another prove to run your mission critical workloads on Solaris SPARC to get security, compliance and all important features to ensure an enterprise architecture.

Did I say welcome to cloud computing today? 😉

Solaris I/O Latency

Starting with Solaris 11.4 you got a new interface for device latency without using dtrace. The information was always there but now you can use a “human readable” command. That might bring easier understanding and analyzing the disk subsystem.

I ran an IO calibrate in a 18c database which resides on NVMe flash drives:

root@t7primary01:~# iostat -x -L c5t1d0 c1t1d0 1
                     extended device statistics
device     r/s    w/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv wsvc_t asvc_t  %w  %b
blkdev2   29.9   13.1  185.7   81.4  0.0  0.0    0.0    0.1   0   0
latency          range         count      density distribution
                  <4us             0        0.00%        0.00%
                 4-8us          3527        0.02%        0.02%
                8-16us       1224166        5.74%        5.76%
               16-32us       4020858       18.85%       24.61%
               32-64us       1225365        5.75%       30.35%
              64-128us      13243355       62.10%       92.45%
             128-256us       1561222        7.32%       99.77%
             256-512us         34758        0.16%       99.93%
            512-1024us          4642        0.02%       99.96%
                 1-2ms          3624        0.02%       99.97%
                 2-4ms          5758        0.03%      100.00%
                 4-8ms            97        0.00%      100.00%
                8-16ms            33        0.00%      100.00%
                 >16ms             0        0.00%      100.00%
                 total      21327405
blkdev3   32.0   14.0  198.5   86.8  0.0  0.0    0.0    0.1   0   0
latency          range         count      density distribution
                  <4us             0        0.00%        0.00%
                 4-8us          2848        0.01%        0.01%
                8-16us       1280834        5.62%        5.64%
               16-32us       4197957       18.44%       24.07%
               32-64us       1355014        5.95%       30.02%
              64-128us      14167408       62.22%       92.24%
             128-256us       1734203        7.62%       99.86%
             256-512us         29629        0.13%       99.99%
            512-1024us           895        0.00%       99.99%
                 1-2ms           614        0.00%      100.00%
                 2-4ms           939        0.00%      100.00%
                 4-8ms           104        0.00%      100.00%
                8-16ms            27        0.00%      100.00%
                 >16ms             0        0.00%      100.00%
                     extended device statistics
device     r/s    w/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv wsvc_t asvc_t  %w  %b
blkdev2 49234.1    1.0 307781.4   20.0  0.0  5.4    0.0    0.1   0  20
latency          range         count      density distribution
                 <16us             0        0.00%        0.00%
               16-32us             1        0.00%        0.00%
               32-64us            21        0.04%        0.05%
              64-128us         42324       88.06%       88.10%
             128-256us          5647       11.75%       99.85%
             256-512us            67        0.14%       99.99%
            512-1024us             1        0.00%       99.99%
                 1-2ms             1        0.00%      100.00%
                 2-4ms             2        0.00%      100.00%
                  >4ms             0        0.00%      100.00%
                 total         48064
blkdev3 52145.2    0.0 325741.9    0.0  0.0  5.7    0.0    0.1   0  18
latency          range         count      density distribution
                 <32us             0        0.00%        0.00%
               32-64us            28        0.05%        0.05%
              64-128us         44430       87.26%       87.31%
             128-256us          6374       12.52%       99.83%
             256-512us            84        0.16%       99.99%
            512-1024us             3        0.01%      100.00%
               >1024us             0        0.00%      100.00%
                 total         50919

That’s a nice overview…