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> The security fixes are known to significantly slow down Intel processors, which won’t just disappoint customers and reduce the public regard of Intel, it will
by elihu 8y ago
> The security fixes are known to significantly slow down Intel processors, which won’t just disappoint customers and reduce the public regard of Intel, it will probably lead to lawsuits (if it hasn’t already). Suddenly having processors that are perhaps 5% to 10% slower, if they are to be secure, is a significant damage to many companies that run server farms or provide cloud services.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but I was under the impression that the Spectre/Meltdown mitigations have a big performance penalty, but the more recent L1TF mitigations should have little or no impact, and that the new license only showed up recently on the new L1TF mitigation patches.
Is the L1TF mitigation actually a lot worse than I thought, or does this license apply to the earlier Spectre/Meltdown patches, or is Bruce Perens just being sloppy and conflating the two?
Either way, I agree with him that draconian license terms shouldn't be attached to bug fixes.
- cyphar 8y ago> Is the L1TF mitigation actually a lot worse than I thought, or does this license apply to the earlier Spectre/Meltdown patches, or is Bruce Perens just being sloppy and conflating the two? He isn't being sloppy. According to the Debian package maintainer[1], the new license only applies to the new patches (ones after 2018-08-07) which were released long after the Spectre/Meltdown ones -- because the license was only changed in the 20180807 microcode update (and because Debian didn't block the previous Spectre/Meltdown releases over license concerns). In theory, nobody can actually tell you how bad the L1TF mitigation is because of the new license terms (a comparison before-and-after L1TF mitigation would be providing you with comparison test results). [1]: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=906158#14 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=906158#14