Keep in mind that any server worth its name will have ECC RAM, which will negate Rowhammer (aside from the DoS risk; flipping one bit would get corrected and logged, while two or more would trigger an NMI, and the OS would either halt or attempt an orderly shutdown).
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OK, fair enough, but that doesn’t help domestic users at all; very few people use ECC RAM in home machines, and even most businesses don’t in their discrete PCs.
That version, 10.11, runs on computers from 2007. That’s not unreasonable.
Very true. Penny-pinching by manufacturers (and Intel’s market segmentation gambits) are one of the biggest failures of the PC business. Non-ECC RAM shouldn’t even be a thing, as far as I’m concerned.
This is a factor in why my recent builds have all been AMD; at least since the Phenom era, ECC has been built into most of their memory controllers (I think the APUs are an exception). You still have to look before you leap, though, since not all motherboard makers enable the ECC support.
With the end of Moore’s Law, a two-year window of support on OSes (which one might not want to upgrade, as it breaks things) seems unreasonable to me.
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So, the response to @BobD 's question asking when he can buy a new computer with a fix is: Now, if you get one with an AMD processor?
Not really true. For Linux, provided that you have a recent enough compiler, all mitigation are software based (compiler update and source code modification). Only recent (skylake and never) Intel CPU needs a microcode update for Spectre v2.
Yes. They’re cheaper for comparable performance, too, as of a few months ago.
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