If they were erroneous, why weren't they corrected for two decades by those very same chip makers? It was various security researchers that first warned about something like this, not an Intel engineer saying "y'all are holding it wrong".
They should have provided mechanisms for multiple memory domains in the same process, so that people can use their chips securely to do the work the expect to do with them, yes.
Got it. Chip makers have an obligation to accommodate (proactively, no less) stupid things developers do, like running untrusted code in the same process. Makes total sense.
You're trying to casually brush away the entire field of software fault isolation as "stupid things developers do". In fact, SFI has been a respectable area of systems research since at least 1987.
I'm not trying to casually brush away the whole field. MMU-based protection has been overly limiting ever since MMUs were developed. That doesn't mean that every design for providing isolation beyond what the MMU can guarantee is well-thought-out. Certainly, I see no basis for blaming chip makers for the fact that VM developers came up with an attempt at same-process isolation that doesn't work.
It's like all the whining people do about GCC doing unexpected things when faced with code that relies on undefined behavior. That's not GCC's fault.
If hardware architects had intended not to support software fault isolation, then they would have said so back when the field was developed. It's not like people with experience in hardware design weren't in the peer review circles for those papers. Steve Lucco, one of the authors of the 1993 paper, went on to work at Transmeta.
This isn't like GCC, where the C standards bodies officially got together and said "don't do this".
> Certainly, I see no basis for blaming chip makers for the fact that VM developers came up with an attempt at same-process isolation that doesn't work.
The issue isn't that there's a bug in their VM implementation, it's that with current hardware general VMs and same process isolation are mutually exclusive.
They knew since the 90s that people were doing this and expecting it to work, or did you miss that whole Java thing? Java became big as Intel was adding OoOE to their cores.
Hardware and software is codesigned, and yes the onus is on the chip manufacturers to release chips that let you continue to use them securely.
