The new "Fractal" operating system kernel, developed at MIT, gives researchers a clearer look at how computer chips work internally. It was used to study the branch predictors inside Apple's M1 processor, where it revealed a potential vulnerability to major speculative attacks.
Are you telling me the nerds at the #1 nerd university were able to make their own OS??
But Windows is what computers want!
It has electrolytes!
So it’s basically OS with only purpose to explore how cpu works as far as I get it. Seems pretty interesting and usable for projects that work mainly on low level. But it’s interesting why results different between M1 and Intel or AMD chips? Maybe it’s because M1 is arm architecture but I am not sure
ARM and x86 are instruction sets, not architectures. Intel chips and AMD chips can be different from each other, too, just as different ARM processors can be different from each other.
But all modern processors improve performance by engaging in speculative execution, where they run code or calculations before they’re necessary, to have the results on hand in case it’s needed, or rolled back if it turns out it’s not needed after all. The specific methods differ from vendor to vendor and chip to chip (and even core to core on the same chip, as the article discusses).
Exploring these things is important because sometimes speculative execution leaks data beyond the process that’s entitled to view it, and there have been computer vulnerabilities exploiting this (see Spectre, Meltdown, etc.).
