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The most striking thing here is that Linus has apparently dismissed incompetence as a rational explanation. Yes, he is often brash, but usually he is accusing s
by bashcoder 9y ago
The most striking thing here is that Linus has apparently dismissed incompetence as a rational explanation. Yes, he is often brash, but usually he is accusing someone of sheer stupidity. He does not do that here. Linus alleges that we are being lied to - that we don’t know the full story, nor Intel’s motives.
Furthermore, we are left to wonder if Microsoft is also being fed “bullshit” patches, and if they may be less discerning than Linus regarding a proper solution.
- icelancer 9y agoLinus calls people stupid when they are usually being stupid, at least in his eyes. He doesn't wantonly accuse people of stupidity for no reason. It's just that when he perceives stupid activity... well, he generally goes off. It's his main trigger.
- StudentStuff 9y agoThe root question is what else is Intel trying to cover up with these garbage patches? Are they afraid of power leakage across gates allowing an attacker to gain a higher level of privilege in certain generations of silicon, and trying to cover it up with these patches (hence some of the seemingly crazy things they do)?
- bashcoder 9y agoAlternatively, it could also be in the interest of many for these patches to have an inordinate negative affect on performance with Intel CPUs. I am reminded that Linus has experience in the CPU industry (Transmeta), so he is in a position to see both sides on this.
- majewsky 9y agoSorta off-topic, but what did Linus actually do back at Transmeta? Did he contribute to their JIT compiler for x86?
- gmueckl 9y agoAt least the journal reports I read at that time implied that much. He was one of the technical leads on this as far as I recall. So he would have had to get a very good knowledge of the Transmeta CPU and of the x86 instruction set for that task. I think it shows here.
- monocasa 9y agoIIRC, he originally wrote Linux to be 386 specific and essientially to get hands on experience with all of the special features. He was already one of the best minds of x86 who hadn't seen real internals of another chip, hence why Transmeta hired him in the first place.
- FullyFunctional 9y agoProbably not secret anymore. CMS (the "Code Morphing Software" that implemented the x86 emulation) originally went straight to translation which was difficult to get correct and was expensive to do for code that might only be run once. Linus, when he joined said "That's stupid" and wrote an x86 interpreter which then acted as the first tier in the emulation. That let to a massive improvement in quality as more workloads could be tested and enabled an awesome creation by Jim Mattson (IIRC): self-cosimulation. CMS could be run in a mode where all translation were cross checked with the interpreter before the results were committed. This was before my time and I'm sure he did much more. I only have first-hand knowledge of his work on TVM, the Transmeta x86 Virtualization which predated Intel (and AMD's) hardware support for x86 virtualization. Sadly it never productized. I suspect we couldn't find a way to monetize it.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- c12 9y agoI could be very wrong but I read it as Intel trying to cover the fact that there are huge performance penalties with the patch enabled. Therefore Intel will continue to market chip performance sans patch while pushing down the responsibility of enabling them to OS vendors.
- yoz-y 9y agoAren’t most independant benchmarks run on OSes that are already patched?
- yorwba 9y agoNot with those patches, since they haven't been merged yet. The performance decreases that have been reported so far are for Meltdown patches, those new patches are apparently meant to mitigate Spectre.
- dom96 9y agoSpectre affects AMD as well, how have they been handling this?
- jessaustin 9y agoThey might not "handle" it until there is a POC?
- genmon 9y agoWhy did you pick that specific example (power leakage)? Is there a proof of concept that does something similar?
- FesterCluck 9y agoThats specific... Why did this come up?
- azernik 9y agoHe's quite clear about his theory as to Intel's motives: > The whole IBRS_ALL feature to me very clearly says "Intel is not serious about this, we'll have a ugly hack that will be so expensive that we don't want to enable it by default, because that would look bad in benchmarks". > So instead they try to push the garbage down to us. And they are doing it entirely wrong, even from a technical standpoint."
- mcv 9y agoThat bit sounds to me like Intel is trying to pull a "Volkswagen": have it perform better in benchmarks than in real life (when hopefully secure execution will be enabled).
- HelloNurse 9y agoMore generally, an opt-in switch to disable unsafe behaviour expresses a clear intent to preserve the unsafe behaviour for the foreseeable future. Disabling unsafe behaviour for good on current chips and removing it from future ones would be equally easy, and clearly it isn't Intel's intent. Plausible reasons, apart from looking good in benchmarks, include ease of access for their three-letter friends and not bothering with the cost of designing safe and high performance processors.
- beached_whale 9y agoI would hope that it would not be removed if there is a performance difference. Not all systems are multi user, thinking stuff like includeos or systems that can control their interaction such that the risk in very minimal and not worth the cost.
- jessaustin 9y agoIf it were removed, the new processors would simply be worth less than the ones that immediately preceded them. The systems you're thinking about would then cost less. What's the problem? The problem, of course, is that vendors couldn't pretend to sell systems that are worth the prices they would have quoted before all of this awfulness was exposed. That would be a problem for the vendors only. The rest of us would be better off.
- jasonkostempski 9y agoHanlon's razor should include an exception where PR and politics are involved. Discounting malicious people as just stupid is the reason so many "stupid" people are in power.
- rhizome 9y agoThat's probably a better fit for Heinlein's Razor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor#Similar_quotations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor#Similar_quota...
- jasonkostempski 9y agoHeinlein seems to agree with Kostempski's Razor: "Aphorism are worse than useless."
- jessaustin 9y agoHanlon's Razor is stupid... actually I misspoke. It's just evil.
- rabboRubble 9y agoWonder if perhaps Intel is under classified and gagged duress from the government? There has been plenty of evidence the government is not acting with citizen security foremost in its technical and telecommunications policies.
- aphextron 9y ago>The most striking thing here is that Linus has apparently dismissed incompetence as a rational explanation. Yes, he is often brash, but usually he is accusing someone of sheer stupidity. He does not do that here. Linus alleges that we are being lied to - that we don’t know the full story, nor Intel’s motives. "And that's actually ignoring the much _worse_ issue, namely that the whole hardware interface is literally mis-designed by morons." Maybe you missed this line? Some classic Linus right there...