MINIX – The most popular OS in the world, thanks to Intel

https://www.networkworld.com/article/3236064/servers/minix-the-most-popular-os-in-the-world-thanks-to-intel.html

by rbanffy • 9 years ago

175 77 9 years ago

Can someone ELI5 why Intel needs an OS in the processor?

aylons2• 9 years ago

It's the most reliable way to provide a full set of entrenched vulnerabilities, user espionage tools and privacy-evading mechanisms.

d33• 9 years ago

Because the implementation of all the complexity within would be much buggier if they tried to pull it all off from scratch. Also, it would be more expensive.

The official application of ME is, well, about managing the hardware. This means it has to work with lots of different components, including coordination of the resources available. When you think of it, that's pretty much the definition of an OS. Instead of writing their own one, they decided to use one of the ones already available.

turblety2• 9 years ago

Also remember while a case can be made (although in my opinion a very weak one) for why you need a separate computer running beside your main processor, the main issue people have is that you:

- Can not see what that operating system is doing

- Can not read the source code for that operating system

- Can not stop or manage that operating system

- Can not upload/change/edit anything to do with that operating system

zaarn• 9 years ago

I think it should be considered that none of these things are inherent to an OS running in a side CPU to the main CPU.

Rather, these are symptoms of specific implementations.

qznc• 9 years ago

There are a lot more processors in your computer. Every hard disk has a computer [0] and your power adapter might too [1]. Seriously, who knows how many general purpose chips are inside a computer these days?

[0] http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=3 [1] http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/03/01/apples-lightning-d...

bryanlarsen2• 9 years ago

If you're a sysadmin for a machine that you don't have physical access to, and the main OS is hosed, how do you fix it?

It's a very useful feature for large enterprises, and pretty much only for them. The interesting question is why doesn't Intel charge "enterprise pricing" for the feature, just like they do for stuff like ECC?

dimitar• 9 years ago

It's probably cheaper to just ship it everywhere and enable it on enterprises

mnw21cam2• 9 years ago

It's also the method by which a sysadmin will get to hear of drive failures in hardware RAID arrays, ECC memory errors, and other things relevant to the general upkeep of a server, regardless of the OS running and whether it is hosed or not.

vidarh3• 9 years ago

IPMI.

IPMI is not integrated into the main CPU, so you don't have direct ability to control the state of the main CPU, but (depending on implementation) you'll be able to access sensor data, operate on the sensor data logs, get a console etc.

With a properly set up system it means you have a standard way to attach, request a reboot and and interact with the system remotely.

criddell2• 9 years ago

It does hardware initialization. This used to be done with dip switches but is now handled by the BUP module in the ME. It's basically the first thing that is executed on power on. If you wanted to neuter the ME, it would probably be safe to do so after the BUP module finishes its work.

lallysingh• 9 years ago

I don't understand why AMD isn't all over this as a product differentiator

alex_duf• 9 years ago

Because they probably are required to do the same under whatever legal jurisdiction they fall under.

pas• 9 years ago

What makes you say this?

gsich3• 9 years ago

Because this can be a useful feature. (Compare to ILO on servers)

lottin• 9 years ago

They don't need to remove it, adding the possibility to turn it off should suffice.

jacquesm2• 9 years ago

Because then someone might point at their PSP.

jhoechtl• 9 years ago

> Note to AMD: Now might be a good time to remove similar functionality from your CPU lines to try to win market share from Intel. Better to do so now before Intel removes the “Management Engine.” Strike while the iron’s hot and all that.

I am absolutely certain this comes with backing maybe even pressure from government surveillance bodies. You don't have it - you don't get a contract.

AMD does already follow suit and is not better by any means.

tw30tw• 9 years ago

Then they should release the same CPU without the ME. Like they do for overclocking purposes. Leave it to the consumers to choose.

RubenSandwich• 9 years ago

To plays devil's advocate for AMD here. Then America and the other Five Eyes might not allow you to sell your product in their countries without an ME. Thereby you lose a huge market because let's face it most modern nations are now doing surveillance on their citizens, not just the US.

walterbell• 9 years ago

Good news for OpenPower and IBM, where the firmware appears to be open-source, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12168502

Annatar• 9 years ago

You mean you discovered that fimware is bad? Good! Now search for Bryan Cantrill’s latest video on the torment of debugging closed source firmware...

ngneer3• 9 years ago

I do not like the post. It seems scant on details and rife with conclusions. The Google presentation linked to has a bit more detail on the underlying technologies. A modern processor is a complex beast, and a security argument can always be made to reduce complexity. Citation needed for espionage and privacy evasion use cases...

aylons2• 9 years ago

Surely, this is more an opinion piece than a didactic article. Here you have a more detailed write-up on the issue, including a known vulnerability and how others could be lingering: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/05/intels-management-engi...

ngneer3• 9 years ago

Thanks. The citation describes the existence of vulnerabilities and laments the lack of transparency. While the latter is indeed lamentable, and is known to be a contributing factor in increasing risk, vulnerabilities do exist in any system, including transparent ones (e.g., OpenSSL). Still am not seeing any evidence of malice by this vendor, as "providing a full set of entrenched vulnerabilities, user espionage tools and privacy-evading mechanisms" would perhaps imply. Vendors have a hard time with security. Chip vendors are no different, only the stakes are higher.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC3• 9 years ago

That's not how reliable, safe, secure engineering works. You don't consider stuff safe until someone proves that it will kill you/let people steal your data/whatever, but rather everything is suspect unless it can be demonstrated that according to current state of the art/best practices, it can reasonably be expected to be safe.

A bridge isn't considered safe until it collapses, it is considered unsafe until it has been shown that according to our current understanding of physics and material properties, it can be expected to hold up.

The same should obviously apply to software and computing hardware.

ngneer3• 9 years ago

That implication was not intended. I was merely attempting to address the FUD. If anything, I took care to mention that all systems are vulnerable and must be assumed as such.

mrweasel2• 9 years ago

Is anyone actually using Intel Management Engine? I understand why Intel would have it as a feature, but the majority of all users, including large companies and other organisation with 1000+ desktops, don't need it or use other solutions.

Besides not being able to turn it of, it actually seems like a nice enough offer, I just never heard of anyone using it.

Is there a demo of the ME somewhere?

Foxboron• 9 years ago

Intel ME is part of the initialization of the CPU during boot. You are running Intel ME wether or not you think its usefull. Removing Intel ME, or disabling it, results in your computer stopping after 30 sec. Much of the work to remove Intel ME is more about neutralizing the firmware.

Pretty great talk from 32C3 about Intel ME https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7352-towards_reasonably_trustwor...

mrweasel2• 9 years ago

That wasn't really my point. Arguably it should be a feature you specifically enable, or better yet only present if you buy that option.

If you ignore all that, then Intel ME actually seems rather useful, for a subset of users, specifically organisations with large numbers of machines deployed. Still I'm not sure that even the target audience of ME is actually using it, so it seems like a huge waste of time and money from Intel perspective.

garaetjjte• 9 years ago

Intel ME is also used for DRM.

mnw21cam2• 9 years ago

Yeah, I have had my sysadmin email me telling me that my server has reported a few ECC errors on one of the DIMMs. That was done at IME level. Told us exactly which DIMM to replace, made it very easy.

Likewise, I have had him email me to tell me that a hard drive in one of the hardware RAID arrays had failed. No main OS involvement.

There is a use-case for this stuff. What is evil is how it is switched on all the time on everything when that is unnecessary.

cryogenic_soul• 9 years ago

Here is some Russian guys having success in almost fully disabling the Intel ME.

http://www.pvsm.ru/informatsionnaya-bezopasnost/262876

(you can use Google translator from the top of the page, to translate content from Russian to English)

jjawssd• 9 years ago

https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner

georgecmu• 9 years ago

Here's the Register write-up on this: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/29/intel_management_en...

On Monday, Positive Technologies researchers Dmitry Sklyarov, Mark Ermolov, and Maxim Goryachy said they had found a way to turn off the Intel ME by setting the undocumented HAP bit to 1 in a configuration file.

HAP stands for high assurance platform. It's an IT security framework developed by the US National Security Agency, an organization that might want a way to disable a feature on Intel chips that presents a security risk.

The Register asked Intel about this and received the same emailed statement that was provided to Positive Technologies.

"In response to requests from customers with specialized requirements we sometimes explore the modification or disabling of certain features," Intel's spokesperson said. "In this case, the modifications were made at the request of equipment manufacturers in support of their customer's evaluation of the US government's 'High Assurance Platform' program. These modifications underwent a limited validation cycle and are not an officially supported configuration."

EGreg• 9 years ago

"Intel does not and will not design backdoors for access into its products. Recent reports claiming otherwise are misinformed and blatantly false. Intel does not participate in any efforts to decrease security of its technology"

We can all rest easy now that Intel has come out and public said this, right?

batat• 9 years ago

English version in Positive Technologies blog [1]

And this has already been added to me_cleaner [2] as --soft-disable option 2 months ago.

[1] http://blog.ptsecurity.com/2017/08/disabling-intel-me.html

[2] https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner/commit/ced3b46ba2ccd7460...

esistgut• 9 years ago

Replace UEFI with Linux: https://schd.ws/hosted_files/osseu17/84/Replace%20UEFI%20wit...

mwexler• 9 years ago

Good to know that those hours in school wrestling with recreating parts of Minix for my OS class weren't wasted.

But seriously, the Tannenbaum stuff (book, code) was really impressive, if painful to do on 3.5" floppies.

I'm just assuming that by now, we'd have something better for embedded OSes in one of the most central computing approaches used in the world.

tomxor• 9 years ago

Kinda a shame for Minix. I always hoped v3 would pick up a wider following, but this is probably not the right kind of popularity.

Intel would have picked it for it's high reliability (e.g it can survive critical driver bugs without rebooting).

sigzero• 9 years ago

I'd say "wide spread" not "popular".

stinos• 9 years ago

So if there is a web server running, can we access that somehow?

vidarh3• 9 years ago

One of the most popular, not the. Finding precise numbers is hard, but in 2016, IDC reported worldwide PC sales of ca. 65 million units in Q1, and the market has been in decline (the Q1 2016 numbers were at 2007 levels). Meanwhile Android phones alone account for more than that every month, and while Intel does sell some CPUs for tablets etc. and other markets, it's peanuts compared to their PC sales.

So at least Android still ships in more devices.

SEJeff• 9 years ago

Tron or the ETron variant are in far more machines than Linux or Minix. Think about all of the washing / drying machines or refrigerators since vaguely the 80s. Many of them run a Tron variant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_project

sacheendra• 9 years ago

They qualify their stand by adding "... shipping today on modern Intel-based computers"

TallGuyShort• 9 years ago

Thus making the headline effectively: "The most popular OS in the world ... shipping today on modern Intel-based computers ... thanks to Intel".

If we're all MINIX users, then Linux is a major player in the smartphone market and BSD is crushing the laptop market.

fibo• 9 years ago

LOL, so who wins the Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate?

tpeo• 9 years ago

Everybody loses.

Sir_Cmpwn2• 9 years ago

I don't appreciate the degree to which this article conflates MINIX and IME.

Google wants to remove MINIX from its internal servers

No, Google wants to remove IME from its internal servers. They don't care that it's MINIX.

But MINIX has total and complete access to the entirety of your computer. All of it.

You mean IME.

MINIX is really cool operating system, even if it's being used for evil. But other operating systems are used for evil, too. MINIX has nothing to do with the fact that Intel put it on their secondary processors and ran a bunch of nasty services on it.

cormacrelf• 9 years ago

IME has 'total and access', but so does MINIX, it would appear. Relevantly, MINIX is what you would exploit to break into Ring -3. The article conflates them deliberately.

microcolonel2• 9 years ago

On MINIX, you would more likely compromise a process like the file system, and then induce a privileged service to fail, causing the reincarnation server to read your version of that privileged service from the file system; that is, assuming they haven't introduced pervasive load-time signature verification for this version.

wiz21c• 9 years ago

Poor Andrew, now his tool is used for evil... Maybe he should have chosen his license more carefully ? Maybe he sold his soul to the devil to beat Linus ?

Or maybe he doesn't care, in which case, he may read : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_ethics

It sounds harsh, I know, but in the age of computers, these questions do matter (imho).

Sir_Cmpwn2• 9 years ago

Linux is used for evil, too. More pervasively than MINIX, I bet.

therealmarv2• 9 years ago

Remember those hackers from science fiction movies who can control everything everywhere with Internet access? WHY the F*CK is a web server on Ring -3 there? Don't they watch movies at Intel?

adtac2• 9 years ago

Maybe they watch too many ;)

drzaiusapelord• 9 years ago

Because intel saw all the dollars pouring into things like SCCM and other enterprise management solutions and wanted a slice of that pie and the only feasible move to grab that market was a hardware solution, like a poor man's iLO. The same way they saw dollars pouring into RAID controllers and integrated its own soft raid solution into their hardware. Not to mention their other market oddities like their mobile x86 chip, their SSD line, Intel TV, etc.

The promise of dollars makes men do odd things.

therealmarv2• 9 years ago

It's happening: https://twitter.com/h0t_max/status/928269320064450560

zulrah• 9 years ago

so microkernel is finally a thing!

jacquesm2• 9 years ago

I'd think that would have to be some rtos used in cars or other consumer products.

microcolonel2• 9 years ago

I mean, the dangerous thing about ME is not the operating system, but the level of access each module has, and the lack of consumer insight.

This article seems to be trying to fluff up ME by defending MINIX (is it MINX3? that's cool, but still doesn't make ME sit right).

thyrsus• 9 years ago

It would appear http://download.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/sb/in... that one must set the address of the IME before it is net accessible; how do I get there from, e.g., the HP iLO menus?

P.S.: I haven't observed the prompt "Press <CTRL-P> to enterIntel®MESetup" during boot.

signa11• 9 years ago

[citation needed (most definitely)] i would wager that devices running linux are in far greater number than intel hardware.

mmagin• 9 years ago

Interesting Atom boards mentioned in the talk: https://minnowboard.org/

wink• 9 years ago

So does anyone actually have any rough numbers on what kind of specs this MINIX on the IME runs? I mean, in terms of "this is like a 100MHz CPU with 1MB of RAM" or something.

MINIX – The most popular OS in the world, thanks to Intel

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