Linus Torvalds kritiserar Intels hantering av Meltdown och Spectre

Men han verkar ju ändå glad på bilden.

Ska man då anta att det är lika rörigt i organisationen som i deras produkter, eller är det tvärtom?

Det var ord och inga visor!

Stackars Torvalds får jämt och ständigt bära rollen som budbärare av dåliga nyheter. Han framstår sig alltid som en bitter gammal stofil

Tack för förtydligandet, Sherlock

Det spelar ingen roll om du har vpn eller inte, nej.
För att förtydliga: Om Sverige ska spela fotbolls-vm så spelar det ingen roll att det i en by i Norrland dricks hembränt framför tvn, spritdrickarna påverkar inte spelet för dom.

Tja, du, fast det beror kanske på att det här var bland de mer "korrekta" utbrotten på Kernel Mailing List.

Fördelen med Linus är att han åtminstone är pragmatisk och ovanligt opartisk. Om något är dåligt gjort spelar det ingen roll vem du är eller vem du representerar.

Linus är så skön

"Big simplification:
Proper way to fix an hardware bug like this, is that newer cpu gets protected by default, and they answer they are when queried.

So you can ask the CPU "what's your status on bug X" and the cpu answers "i'm good, you don't need to do anything" (newer fixed chips), or "i know about it but was already built, and need microcode update/special behavior to protect myself" (current chips with microcode update), "no answer / I'm not good" (old chips without update).

So new stuff is protected, and you add more protection (and slowdowns, and special stuff) for older chips that don't know how to deal with it.

What Intel is trying to do here, is to go the other way: the chips, even the new ones, will stay vulnerable by default, and when queried they say "I have a fix but I don't use it, you can enable it by asking !" and the kernel is supposed to enable it.

It's terrible for a lot of reasons, like "boot an older os and it's vulnerable since it doesn't know to call this", "additional code to enable this feature has to run for all of eternity for new chips now, instead of having to run for older chips and being phased out over time", etc ...

The reason why Intel does that seems obvious: by default the chip does not lose speed since the fix is not enabled, and so instead of "intel chips lose 30% speed over night because of a flaw" it becomes "intel adds a special security mode that protects you even more for critical applications, at the cost of some speed". Purely marketing speech and decision at the cost of proper engineering decisions, and they need and try to get OSes like Linux to play along. That's what he means by "[it] shows intel had no intention of fixing those flaws".

Additionally there seems to be a second issue in that the quality and behavior of the patches they submitted are trying to hide this deceptively simple but technically terrible behavior by making it look/sound obtuse and complicated.

In other words, intel is using its presence and weight to try and push a shitty solution, but one that is better for them marketing wise. Linus is flabbergasted to be treated like an idiot or a obedient drone that should apply such obvious abusive patches."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16202882

Mera i samma tråd.
"He's complaining about their "fix" being terrible, but isn't fully against using it the end since as you said, that's all there is going to be to have the chips work properly.
The reason he refuses those current patches and directly call it a lie/deception is because of what my last two paragraphs related; if you read his message (where the link points to) it's about half way: Intel tries to disguise it by doing it in a convoluted way.

Basically they try to avoid making it obvious when looking at the code, because they don't want a "if (intel_chip) enable_fix_because_default_is_broken_on_intel();" and instead pushes something that looks like the kernel needs to do lots of complex stuff [aka, "it's complex, and a fix-on-chip is not enough the kernel needs protection anyway !", and that means a terrible patch with lots of garbage and filler code.

Intel's intention is clear in that they specifically pushes this in the same patchset as the "tell the chip to be secure", trying to mush the two things together to make it looks like it's all the same thing, whereas in reality it should be two patchset: one to enable the security mode, and bad for intel marketing wise. And a second one to add those "fixes" to the kernel, that would be refused because terrible and in part unecessary since retpoline already protects it. What Linus is saying is "sure I need the first change, but since you're intent on pushing them together I'm refusing them, because the second one is pure garbage, and you mix them together to hide the first"."

Om du söker bakåt är det inte bara Linus utan även andra som Theo de Raadt (openbsd), vilka i åratal påpekat brister i Intels CPU design. Så det är ju liksom inte att Linus passar på att knäppa Intel på näsan när de har motvind, och det är ju inte heller så att de inte förstår sambanden. Ödmjukhet är bra, och alldeles för sällsynt, men när man bemöter åratals av medvetet slarv känns det inte som prio ett.