What's the advantage of memory protection when the ISA if full of holes.

[AdvancedFollower]

Putting a lock on my front door is inconvenient. it slows me down because I have to unlock it every time I want to go inside and lock when I leave. Also, locks can be picked or broken, I might forget to lock it, or someone might just bypass it and break a window. Therefore locks are pointless and I might as well always leave my front door unlocked.

[AdvancedFollower]

@ronniebeck: rotfl, excellent thanks for the laugh

Putting a lock on my front door is inconvenient. it slows me down because I have to unlock it every time I want to go inside and lock when I leave. Also, locks can be picked or broken, I might forget to lock it, or someone might just bypass it and break a window. Therefore locks are pointless and I might as well always leave my front door unlocked.

What I am saying is more like: Why keep wasting time on locking/unlocking the front door, when the windows are broken, the lock on the back door is missing, and there is a giant hole in the side-wall?

Well that analogy isn't particularly accurate since it's nowhere near that bad. The newly discovered weaknesses are of the "side-channel" type, and very difficult to exploit. The worst ones like Meltdown and the most severe forms of Spectre have already been patched since one year ago (and since I'm running AMD processors, the issues were never as severe anyway). The others are mostly theoretical, and are even harder to implement in practice, with no active exploits taking place. In part, this is actually thanks to process isolation and memory protection in modern operating systems, which makes an attack (even if that's theoretical at the moment) even less likely to actually succeed in gaining access to private data outside of the compromised user process.