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Maybe I wasn't clear. Your explanation and the linked article is very informative, but I wanted to understand what's the "garbage" Linus is talking about. As I

• jpgvm 9y ago
  The garbage part is still somewhat beyond my understanding but as I see it he isn't so much talking about the decision to not disable insecure branch prediction by default but rather addressing some very weird behaviour the patches add to kernel entry/exit points. Namely writing to MSRs (Model Specific Registers). This seems non-sensical as the branch predictor shouldn't need screwing with at this stage because the kernel already has retpoline protection. So he is musing there is further ulterior motives here.. perhaps another vulnerability (beyond Meltdown/Spectre) they are getting out ahead of with these very peculiar changes. He is still ofcourse mad that they don't seem like they want to fix Spectre correctly but that seems tangential to how pissed he is that they are trying to get code merged that clearly does something other than just mitigate Spectre. Unfortunately this entire thread is derailed with garbage about how Linus talks, rather than the fact he thinks Intel is doing something really fucking dodgy here and we should all try work out what it is.