7 ms·
Linus was right
by mm-vorticesoft 9y ago
Linus was right
- gsich 9y agoLike always.
- Valmar 9y agoHe generally is. His rants are almost always spot-on and pure gold. :)
- anfilt 9y agoWell he is known for calling a spade a spade. No matter how blunt that may be.
- cat199 9y agoexcept for when he is wrong. Why he gets a pass for being the 'nice guy' and DeRaadt gets the bad rep is still a mystery to me
- mehrdadn 9y agoAbout what? Would you have a link?
- bmon 9y agoLinus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.” http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1801.2/04628.html http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1801.2/04628.html
- mehrdadn 9y agoOh, this is the same issue?
- carlmr 9y agoIt's the same bug, same company pushing patches, but we don't know if it's the same reason.
- lorenzhs 9y agoIt's not the same company - David Woodhouse works for Amazon. He used to work for Intel but not for a year or so. It's also not the same reason. Linus doesn't like the mitigation in the kernel, disagreeing on how Intel intends to implement it. This article is about unstable microcode patches that Intel retracted, and that retraction has been discussed on here a few times. The article is just exceedingly bad at describing the actual issue. It also doesn't help that the kernel mitigation depends on new flags introduced by the faulty microcode update, but the update being faulty is orthogonal to Linus' opinion.
- cm2187 9y agoI thought he was angry about the mitigation being disabled by default, not being unstable.
- icebraining 9y agoNah, it was more than that: The patches do things like add the garbage MSR writes to the kernel entry/exit points. That's insane. That says "we're trying to protect the kernel". We already have retpoline there, with less overhead.
- rocqua 9y agoThat was about patches to the linux kernel, not the microcode patches.
- icebraining 9y agoYes, but as far as I know Linus has made no comment on the microcode patches, so mm-vorticesoft is probably referring to the Spectre patches in general.
- jononor 9y agoThe microcode patches are binary blobs against a proprietary and secret ISA, how can anyone comment on their quality?
- mjevans 9y agoWhen I read it I believed that Linus was implying that the suggested mitigation was so insane that it seemed like Intel MIGHT be hiding how broken they believed their hardware was with such over-the-top reactions. As well as indirectly asking if they believed the currently accepted mitigation method (retpoline) was considered ineffective.
- sundarurfriend 9y agoHis overall point was a bewilderment at the incompetent and non-sensical patches that were being given as "fixes" in this issue. Linus was pointing out a particular instance of that, but this news and other behaviour from Intel seems to indicate this is part of an endemic, cultural, administrative issue inside the company.
- byte1918 9y agoAren't we talking about two different things? Linux vs Windows kernel?
- cbcoutinho 9y agoOP is probably referencing the 'bullshit patches from Intel' comment from Linus about the patches they were sent, and that Microsoft might have been sent similar obfuscatory patches.
- pjmlp 9y agoGiven that the patches are CPU micro-code delivered by OS drivers, AFAIK, the actual OS won't make much difference.
- emptyfile 9y agoWhat are you talking about?
- richardwhiuk 9y agoLinus was talking about Linux patches, not these microcode patches. They've been known broken for at least a week
- topspin 9y ago"Decades old trap/fault software is being replaced by 10-20 operating systems, and there are going to be mistakes made." - Theo de Raadt