OpenBSD Disables Intel Hyper-Threading to Prevent Spectre-Class Attacks

Security-oriented BSD operating system OpenBSD has decided to disable support for Intel’s hyper-threading performance-boosting feature, citing security concerns over Spectre-style timing attacks.

Introduced in 2002, Hyper-threading is Intel’s implementation of Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) that allows the operating system to use a virtual core for each physical core present in processors in order to improve performance.

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