AMD will reinstate memory encryption on Ryzen 9000 CPUs via BIOS update in July

roboror

Full title: AMD will reinstate memory encryption on Ryzen 9000 CPUs through a BIOS update in July — TSME is coming back after 'valuable community feedback'

opengrass

Rust developer: "Ba da Ba Ba Ba"

dijit

People don’t like things being taken away, even if I don’t think many people are actually using this feature. I don’t even think its exposed in most BIOS’s

Modified3019

They’ve been doing a bunch of stuff in agesa updates regarding memory stability lately, and also recently broke and fixed setting manual speed on DDR5 memory with ECC enabled (basically any setting higher or lower than 5200mhz or something was ignored). I wonder if this was also something they just accidentally broke, or if it was an incompetent attempt at larger segmentation.

helterskelter

Good. Intel's equivalent processors have this feature and BS market segmentation is the kind of thing that AMD was historically against. Even if something wasn't officially supported, they didn't go out of their way to prevent its use.

jolmg

Thought there were cases where other devices could have direct access to RAM (e.g. DMA, PCIe controllers outside the CPU, etc.). Wonder how that works in conjunction.

Havoc

I'm a little puzzled by the uproar given that all the oneline chatter seems to suggest nobody is using this. If this was AVX512 or something I could understand the give it back reaction...

varispeed

I wish they could enable use of non-ECC ram on Threadrippers.

theandrewbailey

> TSME isn't a critical security feature for most consumer desktops, as it protects against attacks where the attacker needs physical access to the device. If you think it's hard to gain physical access to a consumer desktop, you're out of touch. Most desktops aren't locked inside a datacenter. Memory encryption is a valuable desktop (and laptop) security feature.

ChrisArchitect

Discussion on the previous development: AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48582320

RandyOrion

We paid for your things, AMD. If you want to strip some features from things we bought after the purchasing, you must ask me and every other customers for consents explicitly, with a reasonable explanation, and before the strip happens. If one of us show no consent, you cannot do that. ------------- See the github issue [1]. @benkilpatrick found out the problem in April. There was absolutely no consent asking information transparency at all. There was inefficient to no information even for people willing to spend THEIR OWN TIME to solve the problem. After about two months of back and forth with motherboard manufacturer, @benkilpatrick found out the problem stems from some components inside the bios, and the components came from AMD. Another ~three weeks passed and no problem resolution at all. It was after things blow up AMD PR came out and said something about "valuable feedback". Wait, what if there's no enough pushback? What if this github issue as well as the problem it raised is ignored by all? Just see this thread, that thread [2] and whatnot. Is your customers going to screw themselves and being stripped silently for being your customers and believing that new bios will solve their problems without causing shenanigans? ------------- I won't upgrade bios without future third-party bios integrity checks showing the problem is solved properly. [1] https://github.com/AMDESE/AMDSEV/issues/292 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48582320