Ring -1 needs DRAM, so it tells the memory controller to give it some blocks. The memory controller hands back a “physical” address, and promises not to let anything but ring -1 access that address.
The exploit takes advantage of that control register to remap the same DRAM blocks to a different physical address. Since the memory controller only promised to protect the physical address it handed back, that protection is bypassed when using the new address.
There are several theoretical ways to mitigate this exploit, but it remains to be seen if the system is sufficiently field-upgradeable to defend.
The article would be better with just the instructions and audited output. All the LLM added bloat is tiring and distracting; it's like an article from New-Yorker or Wired.
This was a relatively complicated post of the sort that we are lucky to get in any form, AI-assisted or otherwise. Does it meet my personal stylistic standards? No, it's too LLM-ish. Assuming I cared about the presentation at all -- which I don't always, but would here -- I wouldn't be able to stop myself from fixing that in the process of reviewing it. Is it the usual bucket of slop? Emphatically no.
You are literally asking this to people who clearly care...
> In today's present, I wouldn't bother writing the article myself neither besides giving the instructions and auditing the output.
Then why exactly are you even bothering to reply to me instead of having Claude do it and auditing the output? If HN didn't have a rule against it, would you even bother replying yourself?
But really, there's a fair bit more to unpack here than just that. Why wouldn't you bother? Is writing a README.md about some project you worked on really that hard? Even with heavy LLM assistance, I'd wager to guess this project, which clearly involved working on real hardware, was more than just prompting. So clearly there was human effort other than prompting. And I do respect that, but I want people who write things to respect my time. I'm not asking them to disclose every tool they use, I'm asking them to not waste our time with crappy irritating Claude writeups. Whether it's explictly specified or not, we know.
Frankly I struggle to believe that people don't really mind if someone else speaks for them in their own voice, just because they're too fucking lazy to speak for themselves anymore. We've had competent GenAI for like a year or two, at this rate people are going to forget their potty training in another few months.
> Substance is what matters
Substance matters, which is not great for LLMs, because they put out text that has far more fluff than substance. What, however, is far worse for LLMs, is the fact that kick and scream and cry all you want, but: style and presentation matters, too.
It is absolutely true that if you just dropped a very brief blurb that all AMD CPUs from a certain generation can be pwned it would have a decent chance to hit the HN frontpage just out of sheer interestingness. That is not because the style and presentation doesn't matter, it's just that the substance is significant in spite of the bad presentation and style.
And absolutely, we can easily forgive someone for simply not being very good at the presentation and style part, certainly I'm not really an expert at it. But this author has released plenty of great hits before, so I damn well know they can. It's a serious disappointment to see them downgrade to irritating, grating Claude garbage output.