Spectre & Meltdown

[Jon Elson]

On 01/13/2018 06:38 PM, jim stephens via cctalk wrote:
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> And even worse, if he took too long, a fun feature of MVT 
> and not corrected in MVS was if a console channel went 
> unavailable for too long, the system would crash.  Luckily 
> the game would print out a line, and a blob of console 
> messages would come out then ask for another move.
>
> Took 10 minutes to lose a game.
>
> The system administrators regenerated the system to add 
> privilege and authorization to jobs using WTOR which 
> they'd missed.
>
> We found other fun holes like that in MVT.
>
Yup, OS/360 had a number of holes wide enough to let 5 ocean 
liners through, abreast.  My favorite was the stock 
exception handler for the SPIE  (specify program 
interruption exit) allowed you to change a program from 
problem state to supervisor state.  Nobody ever thought 
anybody would ever abuse such a thing.

Jon