IBM i was never affected by (quickly patched) PHP floating point vulnerability

Yesterday an IBM i customer of ours emailed me an announcement he’d received from Zend concerning a vulnerability in PHP concerning floating point numbers. Zend also included instructions for installing their “hotfix.”

Fortunately, IBM i was never affected by this vulnerability, which stemmed from a “design flaw in the x87 floating point unit that is part of an old Intel X86 chipset,” affecting only Intel-based 32-bit PHP builds, according to a NetworkWorld article about the issue.

Here is a table supplied by Zend that shows which platforms were affected (emphasis on non-vulnerability of IBM i added by me):