It seems the x86 architecture is once again afflicted with a flaw that arises out of an unsafely implemented accelerations, namely the just-releaved Zombieload vulnerability. We know that Zombieload is possible when Hyperthreading is enabled. While I could probably ask the following question in the Intel forums, experience has shown that it can take weeks to get a reliable answer there, because there is just one Intel rep there who has to ask the engineers. So I shall ask it here: Is it possible to disable Hyperthreading not for all cores in the BIOS but rather on a per-core basis programmatically from the OS or from the bootloader? I ask because if this were possible, then it would be reasonable to segregate the sensitive code i.e. the kernel and the major daemons into one core that has Hyperthreading enabled, and then run all other (risky) user processes on the other cores, which have Hyperthreading disabled. Cheers.
