“Intel’s Core 2 processors are buggy as hell. Some of these bugs don’t just cause development/debugging problems, but will assuredly be exploitable from userland code. BIOS vendors will be very late providing workarounds/fixes. Some bugs are unfixable and cannot be worked around. Intel only provides detailed fixes to BIOS vendors and large operating system groups. Open Source operating systems are largely left in the cold.

Intel understates the impact of these errata very significantly. Almost all operating systems will run into these bugs. Basically the MMU simply does not operate as specified/implemented in previous generations of x86 hardware. Some of these bugs are along the lines of “buffer overflow”; where a write-protect or non-execute bit for a page table entry is ignored. Others are floating point instruction non-coherencies, or memory corruptions — outside of the range of permitted writing for the process — running common instruction sequences.

At this time, I cannot recommend purchase of any machines based on the Intel Core 2. Intel must become more transparent.