News AMD Radeon Software Reportedly Alters CPU Settings Without User Knowledge

[drea.drechsler]

The same way that bios saves settings, the bios has a very small memory area that is volatile (writable) and if you know the values you can just write the values you want to that address.

Memory Map (x86) - OSDev Wiki

wiki.osdev.org

Ahhh...I remember the olden days of peeking and poking values into memory locations to see if it helped the system after a reboot. A necessary thing when changing the system clock crystal from 10Mhz to 16Mhz and you need to add some wait states for memory (that is real overclocking).

Most early systems used a BIOS settings utility to change settings. I've often wondered if that wouldn't be possible with modern systems, especially since you could run them in an EFI command-line mode.

 

[drea.drechsler]

So RM is akin to Intel's XTU in that sense... 🤔

I've never used XTU, but I think so. The problem was, early on no utilities worked right with Ryzen so everyone had to use RyzenMaster to read core clocks properly and especially temperature. That lead to many thinking RM is the only way to get accurate results. Not true anymore.

 

[Giroro]

The same way that bios saves settings, the bios has a very small memory area that is volatile (writable) and if you know the values you can just write the values you want to that address.

Memory Map (x86) - OSDev Wiki

wiki.osdev.org

You can't just write data to arbitrary physical addresses like that. Windows memory management doesn't work that way, specifically because it would be an extreme security risk that would allow any piece of software to completely own your computer - and that is just for your main system memory.
No part of your BIOS/Bootloader should be in any way exposed to the OS, and it is a very big problem if it is.

 

[TerryLaze]

You can't just write data to arbitrary physical addresses like that. Windows memory management doesn't work that way, specifically because it would be an extreme security risk that would allow any piece of software to completely own your computer - and that is just for your main system memory.
No part of your BIOS/Bootloader should be in any way exposed to the OS, and it is a very big problem if it is.

How do you think that ixtu and ryzen master and all the other OC tools change all the settings, black magic? They set the same flags that the bios does.
Also there can be no owning as already mentioned by others, if the settings are bad you get a reboot or two and the bios reverts to the bios defaults that are stored in the rom part of the bios and can't be changed by anybody except with a bios update.