
Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.” - Valmar
http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1801.2/04628.html
======
bashcoder
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.

~~~
StudentStuff
The 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
Alternatively, 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
Sorta off-topic, but what did Linus actually _do_ back at Transmeta? Did he
contribute to their JIT compiler for x86?

~~~
gmueckl
At 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
IIRC, 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.

------
cromwellian
A lot of people trying to defend being a jerk as necessary in these
circumstances. I think Google culture proves the opposite: Googley code and
peer reviews, blameless postmortems, and a host of other mechanisms that de-
escalate and de-personalize things.

The Meltdown work at Google probably didn't begin with a rant about morons.

It's possible to construct a culture where people can air grievances and
criticize others without inducing flame wars. It only works for Linus because
people won't go nuclear in the response, but for rank and file engineers,
especially of equal stature, if you call someone a moron in a thread, it's
likely to kill productivity and create a negative testosterone ladden
atmosphere of people trying to avoid being wrong, and counter attacking
others.

I've worked at a lot of places where engineer got into heated shouting
matches. It's is not a way to increase the probability of zeroing in on a
problem, or reaching agreement faster.

~~~
quotheth
This is obvious, and it's extremely sad to me that people believe otherwise
and vehemently argue that Linus is justified in his pety rants. _It was always
pathetic_.

The response is shockingly adult, given the culture Linus insists on trying to
push:

[http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1801.2/05282.html](http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1801.2/05282.html)

What an _excellent_ writeup, _despite_ the tantrum Linus threw just a few
replies earlier.

I'd highly recommend only reading the response and avoiding the Linus 'rant'.
The rant contains no valuable information, the response is excellent and far
more informative.

I'm sure I'll get downvoted though for calling Linus a baby, because somehow
insulting Linus for his flaws is never ok but when Linus does it it's so cool!

~~~
lucideer
> _The response is shockingly adult_

Some snippets from the response:

> _since the peanut gallery is paying lots of attention it 's probably worth
> explaining it a little more for their benefit_

> _not just drop it quietly because poor Davey is too scared that Linus might
> shout at him again_

> _If we can be done with the shouty part, I 'd actually quite like to have a
> sensible discussion_

None of this is adult. I'm not directly defending Linus' tone, or claiming
that he's "more adult", but derogating and condescending the audience reading
these public posts (1st quote), making cheap jokes about Linus' behaviour (2nd
quote) and directly insulting Linus (3rd quote) is not what I would define as
an "adult" response. Linus' email at least only gets angry and offensive while
critiquing the _code_ , and doesn't get personal.

> _The rant contains no valuable information, the response is excellent and
> far more informative_

Linus' "rant" informed me that Intel are setting IBRS as a default-off feature
that must be asked for - offloading responsibility for security to the
software. The response opens by condescending me, tells me that IBRS is
expensive (we know), retpoline is performant, and the informativeness seems to
stop there.

It then posits that as somehow justifying the offloading of said
responsibility with the following:

> _Then along came Paul with the cunning plan of "oh, indirect branches can be
> exploited? Screw it, let's not have any of those then", which is retpoline._

> _But wait, why did I say "mostly"? Well, not everyone has a retpoline
> compiler yet... but OK, screw them; they need to update._

"Screw them" is the crux of his answer to Linus' concerns. Sorry, how is this
in any way an adult response?

~~~
salvar
Linus doesn't get personal when he calls Intel engineers morons? Are they not
persons?

~~~
lucideer
Yeah you're right. I should have worded that differently, my point was that in
using the term "moron", he was focusing on the interface design: code.

Linus' tone is not really defensible, but I just don't think the response
compares favourably either.

And, perhaps more importantly, Linus' concerns aren't addressed and the
response isn't particularly informative. dwmw2 mentions in comments here on
this HN thread that he has been pushing back on Linus' concerns, but the
response appears rather to defend those decisions in Intel. Perhaps I misread?

~~~
sjwright
At the end of the day, I just don't care about this tone argument. I only care
that the issue is resolved properly, and like it or not, there's nobody I
would trust to analyse an issue like this more than Linus.

People in this thread are making the (understandable) mistake of assuming that
Linus' remarks were aimed at individual engineers at Intel. But they obviously
weren't: they were clearly aimed at senior management at Intel to say "we're
not going to accept garbage from you."

And I don't even care if it _was_ garbage. Because either it was garbage, or
they failed to demonstrate to Linus that it was not garbage. Either way this
is entirely Intel's fault.

------
dotancohen
I must say that I'm really happy that Linux is taking a stance on this one. He
doesn't care what the legal consequences to Intel are, he is pushing for a
proper technical solution damned be the consequences.

~~~
smcleod
You’re not the only one, he may be brash at times but god damn we need him and
maybe we need his brash anti-bullshit meter too.

~~~
ealexhudson
Being able to call out bullshit doesn't mean having to curse it out. All Linus
needs to do is say something like "I don't understand why this is here, and
I'm not merging it until I do", rather than "They do literally insane things.
They do things that do not make sense". The latter is not a technical
argument, and it doesn't provide accuracy or clarity about next steps.

"So somebody isn't telling the truth here. Somebody is pushing complete
garbage for unclear reasons" \- maybe the patches are bad. Or maybe there is
an undisclosed vulnerability (like
[https://skyfallattack.com/](https://skyfallattack.com/) ?) that needs this
"garbage" to mitigate it, and no-one got Linus properly in the loop. If it's
the latter, all this shouting and cursing about "They do things that do not
make sense" has likely attracted the attention of people interested in such
things...

~~~
icelancer
>> Being able to call out bullshit doesn't mean having to curse it out.

Here we go.

>> All Linus needs to do is say something like

And all you need to do is be that nice and be as brilliant as Linus is.

Oh, it's harder to be that smart than it is to be that nice? Maybe consider
that for people as highly gifted as Linus, _it actually isn 't._

What you take for granted as normal behavior isn't always normal to others,
especially those at the outliers of skill and intelligence.

~~~
ealexhudson
I think you're misreading my comment. The original post was "we need this
brashness", my point is, we don't.

If a specific individual is unable to communicate without that, that's a
totally different matter - being able to accommodate a wide church of people
is a crucial diversity matter.

Would it have been clearer if I had said "All someone in a project leadership
position needs to say ..." ? I'm arguing against that the notion that this
approach is necessary, not that it shouldn't be accommodated.

~~~
MaxBarraclough
I'm inclined to disagree on all points.

As sundvor already pointed out, Linus's cursing _works_. He uses it for
emphasis, to bring attention to bear where it's needed. Being polite would
likely be less effective.

> If a specific individual is unable to communicate without that, that's a
> totally different matter - being able to accommodate a wide church of people
> is a crucial diversity matter.

So shouldn't you be OK with Linus cursing?

I disagree here too, though. Cursing is a choice, not a disability.

If, say, a firm fires someone for failing to maintain a civil tongue, I'd
hardly call that a diversity problem. It could be quite reasonable, depending
on the firm.

> I'm arguing against that the notion that this approach is necessary, not
> that it shouldn't be accommodated

Define 'necessary'. Would the kernel implode if Linus were more polite? Of
course not, but I still agree with sundvor that Linus uses it as an effective
tool. He's not just an angry child with poor impulse control.

~~~
piyush_soni
Linus' cursing works because he's Linus, not because he is cursing. There is
really no evidence that if he uses strong but less abusive language the work
won't get done.

~~~
icelancer
>> There is really no evidence that if he uses strong but less abusive
language the work won't get done.

That is because there is no other copy of Linus. There's plenty of other
lesser software developers who can't do a tenth of what Linus did in his life.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
There's also no other copy of Donald Knuth, or Dennis Ritchie, or Alan Kay, or
any other computer luminary. There's also no other copy of any "other lesser
software developer" or you or me or the baristas at your closest Starbucks.
What you've said in response is "the sky is blue": indisputably true and
essentially irrelevant.

I'd argue that in fact, there _is_ circumstantial evidence that brilliant
computer programmers can get work done without occasionally making those they
interact with miserable: that evidence is the fact that most brilliant
computer programmers get work done without occasionally making those they
interact with miserable. There is nothing that _requires_ Linus to make strong
points by jumping and down and screaming. That's an affection he deliberately
chooses.

There's a strong notion through this whole comment thread of "if he didn't do
that, nobody would listen to him," which is absolute nonsense. People don't
listen to him because of these kinds of outbursts, they listen to him _because
he 's Linus Torvalds._ They listen to him in _spite_ of these kinds of
outbursts.

~~~
dTal
>People don't listen to him because of these kinds of outbursts

Check the title of the thread you're in, and how many comments it has. People
_absolutely_ listen to him when he has these outbursts. It's usually a solid
indicator there's something worth getting outraged about.

------
kbenson
And here[1] is Woodhouse's coherent latest reply as of a couple hours ago on
the issue, which explains for all us in the peanut gallery (his words, which I
think are spot on) exactly what this is about, why it's included, how it
actually affects the situation, why it was put forth at all, etc.

It appears much less sinister than Linus was insinuating, but Linus has yet to
reply.

1:
[http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1801.2/05282.html](http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1801.2/05282.html)

~~~
wilun
That's an interesting summary but I predict that Linus will destroy him for
completely avoiding the hard question: why the fuck IBRS_ALL would not be on
by default on future "fixed" chips, if on such CPU it would not be somehow
crappy. And the risk of it becoming architectural (with that absurd default)
is insane too.

~~~
dwmw2
Why would he do that? I completely agree with him on that, and I already told
him I've been pushing back on it since I first heard about it a few weeks ago.
Although there are technical reasons why we might need IBRS_ALL as a stop-gap
before we can get to a _proper_ solution, we bloody well ought to have line-
of-sight to a proper solution in the same way that RDCL_NO says "it's OK, we
fixed it" for Meltdown.

But that's a separate topic. As I explicitly said, I limited that answer to
the things we can do on _current_ hardware.

------
mrmondo
In case it’s unclear to anyone, David Woodhouse (the person Linus is replying
to / previous poster) works for Amazon and previously Intel[1] aka @dwmw2 on
Twitter, ironically his twitter profile is: “Kernel hacker. Known to
occasionally promote an attitude of violence towards complete morons.”

*[1] Correction, I thought (as does Google) that he still worked at Intel, but it was pointed out that he now works at Amazon UK.

~~~
avree
Thanks for this, the beginning where he quotes himself threw me off.

~~~
NamTaf
I, too, missed the double-indenting at the start and thought David was
replying to Linus. Once I got to the textbook swearing I double-checked and
figured it out.

------
trynewideas
FWIW, at least a small part of that email is due to a confusion between Intel
acronyms:
[http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1801.2/04637.html](http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1801.2/04637.html)

~~~
koheripbal
Agreed, but I don't think it changes the bulk of what he's talking about.

------
PrimHelios
I always appreciate Linus' rants. In addition to being somewhat humorous, I
usually learn a thing or two from them. It amazes me that people focus on how
much of a jerk he's being instead of actually looking at the contents of his
emails and learning something.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Really? The internet is full of ranting commenters. They all have content of a
sort. His don't deserve any more attention just because he's the subject of a
hero-worship cult.

Its actually possible to find thoughtful commentary on most any subject,
without suffering jerks.

~~~
justherefortart
Sometimes you just get sick of people pushing off garbage like it's a 3 star
Michelin meal.

As the primary kernel developer, the amount of crap he has to deal with gives
him broad levity IMO.

I've worked with engineers across many fields over my ~35 years of working.
When they're ripping you a new one, you pretty much always deserve it.

Putting shit on a plate is being a jerk, because you're not only wasting your
time, you're wasting his time as well.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
So we're just to take his word for it? Other than profanity what I read had no
specifics, just jerky complaining. By a guy who is arguably not an expert at
the issue (of Intel Processor microcode internal vulnerabilities).

A thoughtful comment would have illuminated the issue, explained why the fixes
were too broad or not specific enough, and how they could be improved.

~~~
figgis
> By a guy who is arguably not an expert at the issue

Linus is the defacto expert on the Linux kernel. His familiarity with the
kernel and long history on these issues gives him the credibility to say a
patch or code is completely nonsensical.

This isn't Intel's first rodeo. They know what is expected and they continue
to play games with their code. If they are pushing garbage then there's a very
good chance they know it's garbage.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Sorry, I've read the Linux kernel. Not a paragon of coding or design. Mr Linus
is not a good programmer.

And he'd have to be an expert on Intel processor internals, which he really
can't be. Not in a position to know the details.

------
Animats
Well, Torvalds has been heard from, along with Bloomberg and The Economist, as
saying that Intel is in denial about this being a big, big problem.

~~~
walterbell
Has a major technology media outlet taken a similar position as Bloomberg and
The Economist?

~~~
ryanlol
Are there any people who care about what the “technology media” says?

~~~
lucb1e
I do. I don't know Bloomberg or The Economist that well, but translating the
media brands to Dutch ones, I'd definitely care more what Tweakers.net says
about something than NOS - tech news versus general news. I know there are a
few people at Tweakers who truly understand technology (like, they can
probably write code) whereas at NOS you'd be happy if they explain the word
"ransomware" correctly.

~~~
DangerousPie
The Economist is usually surprisingly well-informed about things like these.
It's pretty much the only mainstream newspaper where I can read articles about
my field without cringing.

~~~
fsloth
This. I'm not really sure if I need other news media in global affairs. If
it's important Economist will cover it sooner or later, and if it's not, no
one will remember it one month after the fact.

------
Waterluvian
I have a gut feeling that all of this madness is driven by legal and
management terror. Doing the right thing likely means, to many people,
admitting fault. Legal has likely banned anyone from doing anything that looks
like an admission of guilt. Management and PR, etc. are all probably about
saving face, too. The people who care about doing the right thing from a
technology perspective likely don't have any power.

------
mrmondo
I think we should count ourselves lucky we have someone so good at spotting
bullsh*t like this - and isn’t afraid to call it out as they sees it.

Intel & friends have absolutely disgusted me lately, it could be all to easy
to settle for less based on their standards, but let’s not let them set the
standard - they’ve shown they can’t be trusted with quality and when they fail
- they can’t be trusted to be transparent or even take ownership of the
problems they create.

~~~
Roritharr
Not only spot, but also invests the energy in calling it out and explaining
it.

Many business failures i've witnessed happened ultimately because nobody had
the energy to cut down the bullshit forest that constantly regrows around a
company.

~~~
bassman9000
We should treasure it while it lasts, before PC culture silences him. And
before downvoting, recall how many threads regarding _Linus abusive behavior_
(sic) we've had.

~~~
pdpi
Can we stop repeating this? Assertiveness and assholery are not one and the
same. Linus has both in abundance, and we can decry the one without wanting
the other to go away.

~~~
crdoconnor
Linus "being an asshole" is what drew attention to this issue. His caustic
nature is marketing of a sort.

It's clearly putting additional pressure on Intel. How you feel about that
depends on how you feel about them furiously trying to sweep everything under
the carpet and hoping nobody notices.

Personally I think his humiliation of Intel here is putting necessary pressure
on them. If he couched his terms and tried to be "nice" about this they
wouldn't feel nearly the same pressure.

~~~
pdpi
See it from this angle: if Linus wasn't known for flipping his lid all the
time, him flipping out _this_ time would be even more impactful. Overuse makes
it progressively less remarkable.

I wasn't even saying that his tone on this particular instance was excessive.
I was responding to the general accusation that "PC culture will silence him".
There's exactly one sentence I have issues with here ("the whole hardware
interface is literally mis-designed by morons"). The rest of the email is
toeing the line, but manages to be forceful without being outright insulting.

~~~
crdoconnor
>See it from this angle: if Linus wasn't known for flipping his lid all the
time, him flipping out _this_ time would be even more impactful. Overuse makes
it progressively less remarkable.

I don't. This is pretty much part of his brand. He's developed a reputation
for flipping his lid and lambasting people who have _always_ deserved it using
entertainingly colorful language. That's why these rants still get to the top
of HN.

>I was responding to the general accusation that "PC culture will silence
him".

I mean, that seems to be what you're trying to do by demanding that he water
his language down to something that has minimal emotional impact.

It's not like using the word morons is particularly offensive, either - except
to the people who actually deserved it (Intel).

>There's exactly one sentence I have issues with here ("the whole hardware
interface is literally mis-designed by morons").

Which is the sentence that got this rant on hacker news, which attracted all
the attention _which is necessary_ in order to put pressure on Intel to fix
their shit.

~~~
pdpi
> Which is the sentence that got this rant on hacker news

And yet the title of the submission is "Somebody is pushing complete garbage
for unclear reasons". That's a good suggestion that the moron quote is not
"what got this rant on hacker news". Perhaps it's on hacker news not because
the form is inflammatory, but because the content is insightful.

Maybe—just maybe—the fact that the Linux project lead publicly accused Intel
of not having their shit together is newsworthy and would end up on the front
page of Hacker News no matter what tone it was written in, because that is
newsworthy enough in and of itself.

~~~
justaaron
spooks keeping their back door open? a la Dual_EC_DRBG and RSA etc...

------
delta1
> Have you _looked_ at the patches you are talking about? You should have -
> several of them bear your name.

This made me so nervous on his behalf

~~~
johnflan
It is possible the patches are submitted on behalf of others.

------
ageofwant
Linus is angry, that always makes me happy.

Lord knows where we would be today if we had leaders like this more frequently
through history.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
It does make me worry about the day that Linus retires. I imagine the kernel
has enough momentum to carry on for a while but without a leader like Linus I
can see it very slowly starting to unravel and quality issues starting to
sneak in, much like we're seeing with post-Jobs Apple.

Thankfully it doesn't seem that time is coming any time soon.

~~~
karambahh
What about *BSD ? How are they managing their kernels and other important
decisions?

I know next to nothing about the BSD communities, my only interaction with the
BSD is discussing the taste of a pizza Theo de Raadt and I shared about 20
years ago and young me had no idea who he was. I later heard he is at the helm
of OpenBSD and is used to strongly defend his opinions but it is only hearsay.

I have no idea how FreeBSD or OpenBSD communities are organized but I suspect
they might not be relying on one specific individual for their major
decisions?

~~~
nbsd4lyfe
As for NetBSD, there's hundreds of people with commit access and a small group
of respected developers to resolve disputes, with some extra democracy / laws
restricting it. FreeBSD is similar but I never bothered to check the details.

I think we generate less hackernews-worthy drama posts overall because when
someone is repeatedly abusive, they're asked privately to stop/apologize, and
if they keep at it, they risk being kicked from the project.

With hundreds of contributors and a weak hierarchy, no one person is too
important to be kicked.

------
shoover
Are people reading the rest of the thread? Linus admitted mistaking an acronym
and changed his tone from "pushing garbage for unclear reasons" to just
"garbage patches".

------
SpEd3Y
I have a question :)

Can it be that Linus is so angry with people and their incompetence because he
actually gives a shit about Linux and the code?

I'm not interested if his rants are ethic or not, if they are effective or
not. I'm just trying to understand why he's ranting? Because he's an ill
adjusted person? Or is there something else?

Linus is 'infamous' for being very angry with people who write shitty code.
Why is that? If you read the chapters written by him in 'The Hacker Ethic',
you find out that he codes because he's enjoying it, it's what makes him
happy, so to speak. Therefore, he is invested in the code he writes. It's not
just a job for him. It's his life's project, his 'baby' if you will.

Can it be that because he's so emotionally invested into the code, when he
sees that other people push shitty code and don't care about it, the intensity
of the emotions he feels are way higher than the emotions of a manager who's
just 'doing his job'? Can it be that because he cares so much, he's having a
hard time not reacting so 'emotionally'?

------
Aissen
Haha, two mails down, David Woodhouse doesn't disappoint and sends a message
that'm copying here:

[http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1801.2/05282.html](http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1801.2/05282.html)

    
    
        I think we've covered the technical part of this now, not that you like
        it â not that any of us *like* it. But since the peanut gallery is
        paying lots of attention it's probably worth explaining it a little
        more for their benefit.
        
        This is all about Spectre variant 2, where the CPU can be tricked into
        mispredicting the target of an indirect branch. And I'm specifically
        looking at what we can do on *current* hardware, where we're limited to
        the hacks they can manage to add in the microcode.
        
        The new microcode from Intel and AMD adds three new features.
        
        One new feature (IBPB) is a complete barrier for branch prediction.
        After frobbing this, no branch targets learned earlier are going to be
        used. It's kind of expensive (order of magnitude ~4000 cycles).
        
        The second (STIBP) protects a hyperthread sibling from following branch
        predictions which were learned on another sibling. You *might* want
        this when running unrelated processes in userspace, for example. Or
        different VM guests running on HT siblings.
        
        The third feature (IBRS) is more complicated. It's designed to be
        set when you enter a more privileged execution mode (i.e. the kernel).
        It prevents branch targets learned in a less-privileged execution mode,
        BEFORE IT WAS MOST RECENTLY SET, from taking effect. But it's not just
        a 'set-and-forget' feature, it also has barrier-like semantics and
        needs to be set on *each* entry into the kernel (from userspace or a VM
        guest). It's *also* expensive. And a vile hack, but for a while it was
        the only option we had.
        
        Even with IBRS, the CPU cannot tell the difference between different
        userspace processes, and between different VM guests. So in addition to
        IBRS to protect the kernel, we need the full IBPB barrier on context
        switch and vmexit. And maybe STIBP while they're running.
        
        Then along came Paul with the cunning plan of "oh, indirect branches
        can be exploited? Screw it, let's not have any of *those* then", which
        is retpoline. And it's a *lot* faster than frobbing IBRS on every entry
        into the kernel. It's a massive performance win.
        
        So now we *mostly* don't need IBRS. We build with retpoline, use IBPB
        on context switches/vmexit (which is in the first part of this patch
        series before IBRS is added), and we're safe. We even refactored the
        patch series to put retpoline first.
        
        But wait, why did I say "mostly"? Well, not everyone has a retpoline
        compiler yet... but OK, screw them; they need to update.
        
        Then there's Skylake, and that generation of CPU cores. For complicated
        reasons they actually end up being vulnerable not just on indirect
        branches, but also on a 'ret' in some circumstances (such as 16+ CALLs
        in a deep chain).
        
        The IBRS solution, ugly though it is, did address that. Retpoline
        doesn't. There are patches being floated to detect and prevent deep
        stacks, and deal with some of the other special cases that bite on SKL,
        but those are icky too. And in fact IBRS performance isn't anywhere
        near as bad on this generation of CPUs as it is on earlier CPUs
        *anyway*, which makes it not quite so insane to *contemplate* using it
        as Intel proposed.
        
        That's why my initial idea, as implemented in this RFC patchset, was to
        stick with IBRS on Skylake, and use retpoline everywhere else. I'll
        give you "garbage patches", but they weren't being "just mindlessly
        sent around". If we're going to drop IBRS support and accept the
        caveats, then let's do it as a conscious decision having seen what it
        would look like, not just drop it quietly because poor Davey is too
        scared that Linus might shout at him again. :)
        
        I have seen *hand-wavy* analyses of the Skylake thing that mean I'm not
        actually lying awake at night fretting about it, but nothing concrete
        that really says it's OK.
        
        If you view retpoline as a performance optimisation, which is how it
        first arrived, then it's rather unconventional to say "well, it only
        opens a *little* bit of a security hole but it does go nice and fast so
        let's do it".
        
        But fine, I'm content with ditching the use of IBRS to protect the
        kernel, and I'm not even surprised. There's a *reason* we put it last
        in the series, as both the most contentious and most dispensable part.
        I'd be *happier* with a coherent analysis showing Skylake is still OK,
        but hey-ho, screw Skylake.
        
        The early part of the series adds the new feature bits and detects when
        it can turn KPTI off on non-Meltdown-vulnerable Intel CPUs, and also
        supports the IBPB barrier that we need to make retpoline complete. That
        much I think we definitely *do* want. There have been a bunch of us
        working on this behind the scenes; one of us will probably post that
        bit in the next day or so.
        
        I think we also want to expose IBRS to VM guests, even if we don't use
        it ourselves. Because Windows guests (and RHEL guests; yay!) do use it.
        
        If we can be done with the shouty part, I'd actually quite like to have
        a sensible discussion about when, if ever, we do IBPB on context switch
        (ptraceability and dumpable have both been suggested) and when, if
        ever, we set STIPB in userspace.

------
fouc
Are state actors or others trying to take advantage of meltdown needing fixes
& patches to insert their own version of fixes & patches that end up
benefiting them?

~~~
jnordwick
As far as we know, there has never been a single attack using either of
specter or meltdown issues. No code had been found, nothing.

It appears to be very difficult to take advantage of, and the initial idea of
a JavaScript exploit seems to not be possible.

Part of the reason for all of this might be that the attacker needs to run
code on the target machine, and one the attacker can do that, there are far
easier ways to read memory.

~~~
aidenn0
Meltdown is almost _trivial_ to take advantage of, as these things go, _and_
it was discovered independently by more than one researcher. That makes it
somewhat more likely to have been exploited by a government level attacker.

However, just being able to read all of kernelspace is more of a force-
multiplier than being useful on its own. You still need to get your code
executing in user-space to do anything, ant it's value even then is at least
partly tied up in its ability to easily defeat KASLR.

~~~
jnordwick
Trivial, yet nobody has managed to produce a working exploit that doesn't
require a running start. The poc exploits wouldn't work in the wild. They are
running with interference of a real system.

Also, meltdown requires the data to be snooped to be in L1D cache. So the
current demo exploit has to keep pushing the data into cache to be read.

Something simple like steal a password from sudo should be trivia right? I'd
not convinced i need to worry.

And making non public facing machines pay the price of the mitigation seems
like too much.

~~~
ageofwant
Absolutely. I will be really pissed of if I'm forced to run a -30% kernel
performance on my dev laptop, or god knows how much of my 1/2 decade old
T420's to fix a problem I don't have. Yes, I expect my cloud provider and bank
to apply the patch, my ARM based router is fine.

Thanks, but no thanks, do not want.

~~~
cryptonector
You have secrets, some of them worth a lot:

    
    
        - cookies (e.g., for online banking sessions)
        - keys (e.g., for pushing to git repos)
        - browser history
        - identities (oh, did you post anonymously somewhere?)
        - ...
    

PoC code that runs in-browser exists. It's only a matter of time before it's
weaponized.

~~~
jnordwick
There is no in browser meltdown exploit at all.

And even the whitepaper doesn't have a working js exploit of spectre, just a
couple pieces and some assumptions.

------
ratinacage
> As a hack for existing CPUs, it's just about tolerable â as long as it > can
> die entirely by the next generation.

> Certainly it's a nasty hack, but hey â the world was on fire and in the >
> end we didn't have to just turn the datacentres off and go back to goat >
> farming, so it's not all bad.

Off-topic, but what is with the "â" in these sentences? Is that just some
weird encoding error, or does it actually have meaning?

~~~
DerekL
Probably an encoding error. An m-dash is E2 80 94 in UTF-8. (An n-dash is E2
80 93.) I suspect that the original UTF-8 is misinterpreted as ISO 8859-1 or a
similar encoding, where 0xE2 is “â”, and the other two are unassigned or
control characters.

~~~
hinkley
Sounds about right.

As a rule of thumb if you see a’s with accents you’re loooking at a UTF-8
encoding problem.

------
ksk
If someone were to call _you_ stupid, would you be more or less willing to
help? How does calling other professionals stupid help the situation?

------
bertolo1988
Looks like Intel is trying to avoiding the best solution to not compromise
benchmark scores.

------
krisives
It's upsetting that the media and some of the mainstream audience see Linus as
a "crank" that only exists to complain and tear people down. Examples like
this show how valuable his experience is. I would NEVER ask him to water
himself down knowing it would likely make his technical analysis worse.

------
ggm
A lot of comments feel like they are __because Linus __

I want to observe this is somebody who used to work at Transmeta. They were
not a large company, and whilst I don 't think he directly did VLSI, he very
probably understood the interaction of instruction set, chip level behaviour
and upper system (specifically operating system and compiler) implications of
what a chip does.

I am interested in his response to Intel on that basis. I'd prefer he was less
overtly rude and aggressive about it, but I think he manages to convey a real
sense of anger and concern about things: How did Intel arrive at this fix. How
did Intel discuss this fix with people who have to modify systems to work with
it. Qui Bono.

------
bungle
Someone brings shit to you front door in means that they'd like you to bring
it in your house. What are you going to do? Most of us will react on such
similarly to Linus.

------
fareesh
From what I understand of meltdown and spectre, they use a side channel attack
to figure out CPU cache values after some speculative execution has been done.
Can it not be solved by ensuring that the CPU either clears or purposefully
does not cache memory that is read during speculative execution?

~~~
eecc
more or less... I'm surprised the CPU doesn't already flush caches after
speculative execution branches are abandoned

~~~
plorkyeran
Flushing the cache after every branch misprediction would probably make branch
prediction a net loss in performance.

~~~
eecc
Well not all caches, just the part tagged with the mispredicted branch

~~~
singingboyo
But that'd still be vulnerable.

The issue isn't that you can read whatever was in/got brought into cache, the
issue is that you can tell which part of the cache got evicted and infer
values based on that.

------
watertom
The "rant" is an attention getter, no more no less, a bit of theater. Once
everyone is paying attention, then the real purpose begins. Yes, there are
other ways of doing it, but I would argue that none, are even remotely as
effective gaining the necessary focused attention.

------
teekert
Why doesn't Intel just go to Linus and ask politely: "Ok, we f-ed up, here is
a million dollars (or whatever, 10x his normal salary or something) can you
please work with us tightly for some time? Thank you."

I would really respect Intel if they would.

~~~
watwut
Why should they ask politely? It is not like the Linux mailing list would be
polite environment.

Nothing against impolite environment, people make case for it daily here and I
don't care. But it combined with the standard expectation that when someone
else talks to them he should be always polite is getting funny in that
context.

~~~
nippples
There's more ways to be impolite than saying nasty words.

Linus had been treating all this situation very fairly so far, but I guess
Intel just had to repeatedly try pushing very bad fixes to a problem they
created themselves.

Imagine you go to a restaurant, and the waiter just repeatedly brings you the
wrong order, repeatedly.

~~~
watwut
Ad restaurant: I would not be rude to them in that situation. I would refuse
to pay wrong food if I would think I don't want to eat it.

If I would be hungry, I would be angry, but I would still not insult them and
there is no rational reason to do so. I can control my anger in easy
restaurant situatuon like that. At worst, I would leave.

------
tripu
To me, Torvald's nasty attitude usually nullifies his (unquestionable)
technical merits. There's no excuse to SHOUT, curse, and treat others as
imbeciles on e-mail; even less so on fora as public and prominent as the linux
kernel's mailing lists.

As much as I decry patronising calls to make tech more "inclusive" and "nice",
I must admit that people like Linus are a great argument in favour of that...

------
kakarot
_So somebody isn 't telling the truth here. Somebody is pushing complete
garbage for unclear reasons. Sorry for having to point that out.

As it is, the patches are COMPLETE AND UTTER GARBAGE.

They do literally insane things. They do things that do not make sense. That
makes all your arguments questionable and suspicious. The patches do things
that are not sane._

Is Linus suggesting these patches are so bad that there could possibly be a
camouflaged backdoor?

~~~
sgc
He certainly doesn't think it is a mistake. And that would fall within the
spectrum of possibilities, but I would doubt anyone considers that as a
probable reason, since it would be stupid to push something like that right
now. Like future-destroying stupid.

~~~
kakarot
But if he doesn't think it's a mistake... what could it be?

~~~
sgc
He says:

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.

I'm sure there is some lawyer there who says "we'll have to go through motions
to protect against a lawsuit". But legal reasons do not make for good
technology, or good patches that I should apply.

------
kelvin0
Yup, looks like it's time for me to pull out the good ole Amiga 500 from the
closet, and use it as my main PC again. Guru meditation errors anyone?

------
perpetualcrayon
This entire thread where folks are bashing Linus for his tone reminded me of
this fun clip from the classic movie "Team America" (NSFW):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIPSvIz9NDs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIPSvIz9NDs)

------
dschuetz
Yes, finally the engineering community is being divided into two large groups
- one that actually focuses one the technical issue at hand and one that
focuses on personal insults. Everybody is winning, I suspect?

------
jxramos
"Boy that escalated quickly..."
[https://youtu.be/ipsPgNEmAXI?t=301](https://youtu.be/ipsPgNEmAXI?t=301)
Anchorman fight scene aftermath

------
zrb05292
Having a sudden reason to push shadow software patches to nearly every device
and server in the world...I wonder who would benefit from that...

------
frede
It seems the grandparent (authored by Linus, too) in the email thread is not
available any more. Did Linus delete it?

------
nosequel
I want to create a new LKML account just to reply simply with

> s/cool-aid/kool-aid/

Sometimes I just want to see the world burn.

~~~
ars
It was actually flavor-aid :)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_the_Kool-
Aid#Backgrou...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_the_Kool-
Aid#Background)

------
mrmondo
I wish people in this thread would stop turning the discussion into a straw-
man argument about Linus’s language and focus their attention to the technical
and security problems at hand.

Some people are easily offended, some people easily offend, some people are
direct, some people are indirect - get over it.

What matters here is the quality of the code / workarounds that are being
presented, by whom and what alternatives they are.

~~~
c3534l
> I wish people in this thread would stop turning the discussion into a straw-
> man argument about Linus’s language and focus their attention to the
> technical and security problems at hand.

There wasn't much of a technical and security discussion in what was posted.
Linus spent his time writing about his feelings and how hurt they were that
someone did something he didn't like. Very little of substance or merit was
communicated. If you consistently behave like a petulant child in a leadership
role, expect people to gawk at it.

~~~
xelxebar
I feel like a lot of people judge Linus by some internal moral compass which
just seems pointless to me. If anything is petulant and childish it's trying
to control others for not fitting within some arbitrary set of personal rules.

Linus does a good job at maintaining kernel development and often makes sharp
technical commentary. By those measures his communication style seems to have
been successful and practically helpful so far.

------
bshanks
"the whole hardware interface is literally mis-designed by morons"

Taken literally, this is not true.

------
faragon
Intel, please, hire Linus: If you can't beat him, join him.

------
dingo_bat
I'm going to be honest, I need an ELI5 here. I know what the meltdown/spectre
issues are, and kinda understand what retpoline is.

~~~
nolok
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.

~~~
lucb1e
This doesn't make sense though. If Intel indeed plans to leave chips
vulnerable except if you set a flag, then how are these bullshit patches? This
will be the only solution Intel is going to deliver right? I get that he
doesn't like it, but that doesn't explain why he feels lied to. If Intel says
"we're going to not turn the patch on by default", wherein does he suspect the
lie?

~~~
nolok
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".

Eg quotes from said mail to show it's indeed his problem:

> So instead they try to push the garbage down to us. And they are doing it
> entirely wrong, even from a technical standpoint.

and

> 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.

(what he means here is that they try in their patch to make it look like the
kernel needs a special protection, while it already has it through retpoline)

and

> So somebody isn't telling the truth here. Somebody is pushing complete
> garbage for unclear reasons. Sorry for having to point that out. If this was
> about flushing the BTB at actual context switches between different users,
> I'd believe you. But that's not at all what the patches do.

(eg "why are you pushing all this crap around to hide what's really
happening/need to be executed")

~~~
lucb1e
That makes sense, thank you!

------
yAnonymous
Could this whole disaster and the shitty patches have something to do with the
remote kill switch (Anti Theft) Intel have in their CPUs?

If someone could enable and trigger that remotely, it would make for fun
times.

~~~
draugadrotten
It may interest you that a virus which kills its host won't spread as well as
viruses which co-exist. This is basic from epidemics transmission rate. The
longer an infected host keeps spreading the infection on, the more individuals
will be infected. If the host is killed it will no longer spread the infection
and therefore the infection may infect fewer hosts and this reduction in
transmission rate alone may prevent a major outbreak.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_modelling_of_infe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_modelling_of_infectious_disease#The_SIR_model)

~~~
wongarsu
In nature, we usually only consider two success metrics: hosts infected and
hosts killed. To maximize hosts infected, keeping the host alive and
transmitting is very successful, so the most successful examples are those we
barely even take note of (common cold, intestinal worms, etc.). To maximize
hosts killed, in the physical world you either need a long incubation period
where the host stays alive and transmitting (AIDS) or agressive transmission
methods that humans have been getting quite good at shutting down (with the
exception of transmission by mosquito).

In the world of digital viruses traditional metrics can apply too (Ransomware
is measured by hosts "killed", botnets by hosts infected), but those are no
longer the only interesting metrics. A virus that spreads within a certain IP
block and one month after inception bricks everything it can reach might be
regarded as highly successful, despite killing itself in the process.

------
brunoqc
Why do people censor words like that? They are not fooling anyone.

~~~
onion2k
_They are not fooling anyone._

They are fooling the content filters some corporate services use to block
emails though.

~~~
lucb1e
I suspect it has more to do with the American culture. Every time I watch
something American, be it a TV show or YouTube from a big name, things are
constantly bleeped out or you notice they don't mention swear words. It's
super annoying - either accept it and stop beeping, or stop swearing all the
fucking time. It's also not as if you have no idea what that beep meant.

~~~
mschuster91
> It's super annoying - either accept it and stop beeping

IIRC the beeping at least of four-letter-words has to be done to avoid higher
PG-ratings and/or fines from the FCC. Not much to do there.

------
beedogs
All the people here excoriating Torvalds for using mean language couldn't do
in a lifetime what he does in the average week.

Let the man get his job done and stop pretending to be offended by someone who
communicates effectively.

I'm tired of this pearl-clutching nonsense from the youngsters in tech.

------
danjoc
>Not doing the right thing for meltdown would be completely unacceptable.

Like not patching it at all. Like selling new ARM Chromebooks with no plans to
ever patch meltdown in the firmware or kernel. Because that's what
Google+Partners is doing with Rockchip Chromebooks AFAICT.

------
chrisper
Whoever changed the title managed to make it less clear. With "Linus" in the
title it was clear that it was Linux.

~~~
dang
I did that. We've observed over the years that celebrity names in titles tend
to make for poorer discussion. HN is better when the focus is on content
rather than personalities.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20content%20personalit...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20content%20personalities&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0)

Edit: ok, you guys have convinced me that this is a special case and we've put
Linus back in the title above.

~~~
askvictor
But it would certainly be good to have some context on the quote (i.e. that it
has to do with Linux, Intel and Meltdown)

~~~
AHTERIX5000
Yeah, now the title is more clickbaity

------
gambiting
Am I the only person who finds this extremely difficult to read? The top says
"David wrote" and then it looks like he's replying to a message from Linus
Torvalds. So any quoted text is by Linus, right? But then....the letter is
signed by Linus? So who wrote it? I know this is some ancient technology but
Jesus, the user interface is horrendous.

~~~
roel_v
Probably depends on how old you are. To me it was completely obvious and much,
much clearer than most 'modern' user interfaces. Every person replying
prefixes each line with > . Proper email clients do this automatically. This
way you can tell from the number of >'s how far back on the 'stack' you have
to go to know who wrote it. You start reading from the top, mentally
associating an indent level (nr of >'s) with a person/email address. It's easy
to follow any mail with up to say 3 or 4 different people; after that it takes
some thinking sometimes, in long emails.

I'm actually surprised at the number of people here complaining about the
legibility. This is absolutely basic knowledge; or maybe I'm just even older
than I imagine myself to be. How can someone who can't even figure this out
write software? (I realize that not everybody on this site is a programmer
nowadays, but still)

~~~
deckard1
People live in Slack and github today. The last time I had an actual
conversation via email was probably 2 years ago.

It's rather refreshing to see the Linux kernel keeping the tradition of using
mailing lists. Every company I've worked at has felt the need to gather a
bunch of people in a room (or teleconference) and "knock things out" in real-
time. Then, everyone leaves and develops a severe case of amnesia. Never mind
that for technical debates you really need some time to think and reply _in
detail_. Which Slack is not good at, but... surprise, email is. But alas, it's
"too old."

~~~
eru
Google Docs is surprisingly good for some of this kind of deliberation. (We
used it at Google.)

Especially when you use the 'suggesting' feature. It's a bit like a mini-PR
for your docs.

Google Wave was supposed to be really good for this---better than email.

~~~
RainaRelanah
There isn't a week that passes where I don't miss Google Wave. It was a bit
bloated, and javascript engines weren't quite up to speed for it (it was
practically unusable on FireFox), but I still believe it was the best chance
at an email evolution that we'll see in our lifetimes.

------
daveheq
Sound like Intel is interested in allowing hacks, probably for government
oversight.

~~~
jakebasile
This looks less like allowing hacks for states and more like covering their
asses in benchmarks.

------
DiabloD3
So are we going to unmerge this, and force Intel to fix this properly in
microcode?

~~~
Valmar
Said current patches haven't been merged. Just posted to the mailing list for
review.

Retpolines for Spectre, and PTI for Meltdown, are still in the kernel. Linus
doesn't have too much disagreement with them. It's the IBRS / IBPB code for
Intel's CPUs that Linus has a problem with.

Also, not everything can be mitigated in microcode, for many reasons, not all
of which I understand myself. Sometimes, only a fundamental hardware-redesign
can fix the issues proper.

~~~
Animats
Well, for one thing, modern CPUs aren't microcoded much. Real microcoded CPUs
went out with the 1980s. The microcode in today's fast CPUs is mostly
initialization, and maybe emulation support for some instructions nobody uses
any more, like decimal arithmetic or 16-bit mode. The microcode can maybe turn
some stuff off and tweak some tuning parameters. Anyone know what Intel's
"fixes" really do?

~~~
Sephr
Microcode is a little more capable than that. See
[https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9058-everything_you_want_to_know...](https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9058-everything_you_want_to_know_about_x86_microcode_but_might_have_been_afraid_to_ask)

Edit: s/Intel m/M/

~~~
peoplewindow
That talk is about AMD.

------
ramshanker
So, it means more delays in upstream patches.

~~~
mrmondo
Would you rather have the kernel filled with false or botched security?

------
beebmam
Really abusive language. There are ways to communicate his objections to the
patches with extremely strong language WITHOUT resorting to abusive language.

I wouldn't tolerate anyone treating me like this. There are unseen
consequences to a wild tongue.

~~~
shakna
I think you're hitting a cultural barrier.

In my country, if someone brought me something terrible, in a professional
environment, I would tell them it's bullshit, and go try again. And that would
be fine and dandy, and expected. (I'd expect the same treatment of myself. And
it has happened.)

I get the feeling, that in the US, you can't criticise. You have to use some
political language to say you like it, whilst meaning you don't.

Linus is Finnish. He says what he means. And it's expected, and entirely
acceptable.

There are a handful of nations around the world, where saying exactly what you
mean is far more valued than trying to preserve whatever emotion someone has
invested into their work.

~~~
andreasley
Question is, is it constructive? Does ranting really yield better results than
just stating the facts (both short term for fixing the problem and long term
for working together)?

It might work for Linus on the LKML, but it certainly doesn't for everyone and
in all circumstances.

~~~
shakna
> It might work for Linus on the LKML, but it certainly doesn't for everyone
> and in all circumstances.

Exactly, it's cultural.

And, I wouldn't call it ranting. If you look at Linus' famous examples of
this, he may first call it bullshit (calling it as it is), and then he goes on
to explain why it is, and usually also explains how to polish the turd into
what it should have been.

It certainly works in my experience, having been on both ends of this sort of
communication.

It tells you that your quality has fallen well and truly below the expected
level of output.

But it isn't something held against you either. Because in these same
cultures, it is okay to make a mistake, even costly ones. Because they make
you better.

I've shown you that what you made is crap, and why it is crap. So now I know
that you know that sort of thing is crap, and will strive to make something
better. And you also know I won't turn around tomorrow and remind you of it,
because you're passed it. Probably not even in jest.

------
yborg
Run through the Linus drama filter, the only thing I get from this is "Linus
doesn't like the Meltdown/Spectre patches'; Linus having issues with a patch
is, well, not particularly newsworthy. Is there something more significant
here than a bad first go at this?

~~~
dmichulke
I interpreted it as: Intel isn't going to fix Specter in HW (as opposed to
Meltdown)

Instead, they do some crazy _crazy_ black magic in the patches.

~~~
silvestrov
I read it like:

Intel will make a fix but the fix will be disabled by default as that results
in the best performance numbers, those that will be reported in the media.

When you want to use the CPU in the cloud, you have to enable the fix and get
much lower performance. But nobody in the media will care about that as they
have the nice performance numbers and therefore Intel don't care to implement
a fix with high performance.

------
matt4077
I get that Linus is adored for "rejecting political correctness" or "speaking
truth to power", but this email just shows how little such rants can achieve:
he makes almost no argument, relying on his authority instead.

i'm actually not quite sure what he's trying to achieve... There's no chance
that a patch will make it into the kernel against his objections, so he
doesn't really need to convince anybody.

If he's trying to make a case against Intel, he's unlikely to succeed with the
digital version of screaming expletives at people.

I have absolutely no "moral" objections against the use of all the FUCKING
BULLSHITS anybody wants. But there's a reason this style isn't used more often
in politics/law/philosophy or any other profession trying to change peoples'
minds: it really doesn't work.

If anything, these rants show that Linus is unable to effectively use language
to make his arguments. It makes him appear small, weak, and angry.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Are we reading the same thing? He states very clearly the specific technical
issues and behaviour from Intel that he perceives to be "FUCKING BULLSHIT".

