Too geeky to explain in subtitle
AMD has acknowledged the existence of a minor bug in some of its chip families.
The bug was uncovered by researcher Mather Dillon, who ran a few AMD CPUs through a series of tests specifically designed the make the bug crawl out of its hole.
Dillon generated a segmentation fault by creating a “very specific sequence of consecutive back-to-back pops and (near) return instructions, can create a condition where the process incorrectly updates the stack pointer."
It is still unclear how many processors are affected, or which processor families ship with this handy feature. However, the bug was reproduced on an Opteron 6168 and a Phenom II X4 820.
In certain circumstances the bug can result in a crash, but it doesn’t seem like many users will be affected.
More here.
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