At least one of the points in this article isn't true. The article states "RISC-V is not affected by the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities... [because it does] not perform any speculative memory accesses" -- but that's only true for some designs, not anything done by the ISA.<p>Many of the higher performance RISC-V designs do, in fact, do speculation. RISC-V BOOM[0], by Berkeley, is vulnerable to Spectre[1][2]. One of the attempts to create an extension to the RISC-V ISA that has integrated security features (CHERI, [3]) itself was shown to be vulnerable to Spectre-like attacks[4].<p>The fact that most RISC-V chips were not vulnerable to Spectre is simply because they hadn't implemented a particular kind of performance optimization, not because there was anything intrinsic to the ISA that prevented them from being so.<p>[0]: <a href="https://boom-core.org/" rel="nofollow">https://boom-core.org/</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/abejgonzalez/boom-attacks" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/abejgonzalez/boom-attacks</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://boom-core.org/docs/replicating_mitigating_spectre_carrv19.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://boom-core.org/docs/replicating_mitigating_spectre_ca...</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri/cheri-risc-v.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri/cheri...</a><p>[4]: <a href="https://kth.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1538245/FULLTEXT01.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://kth.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1538245/FULLTEXT...</a>
Lately I find myself upvoting every submission from Klara Systems[0]. Focus of the articles seems to be consistently good. I'm not affiliated with them, just an impressed onlooker.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=klarasystems.com" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=klarasystems.com</a>
I’ve recently gained an interest in computer architecture and systems programming in general after some high performance computing projects. Have been hearing about RISC-V from a distance, and am wondering if delving into it would be one of the best ways to satisfy this interest and gain some valuable knowledge/skills at the same time.