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Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

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Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#61

Post by aidenn0 »

dingo_bat wrote: post #15

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.

Linus seems to have two complaints:

1) Recent patch submissions imply that Intel has no good hardware or microcode mitigation for spectre-like attacks. There is a sub-complaint that Intel has a bad (i.e. kills performance) fix, but will not enable it by default because benchmarks matter.

2) This series of patches in particular appears to be doing either something different, or more than what their descriptions imply

These patches do various things, presumably to manipulate the opaque internal state of the CPU, but only Intel knows for sure precisely what they do.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#62

Post by mpweiher »

integricho wrote: post #13
mrmondo wrote: post #8

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…

Intel transformed from a technology company to a management company. That somewhat explains their highly unreasonable behavior.

The part of the lifecycle where the clueless have taken over:

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#63

Post by roel_v »

gambiting wrote: post #35

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.

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)

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#64

Post by mpweiher »

mrmondo wrote: post #8

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…

Yes, and so happy he doesn't follow the kinds of BS rules set out here:

https://medium.com/@sandya.sankarram/unlearning-toxic-behavi...

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#65

Post by aidenn0 »

jnordwick wrote: post #57
fouc wrote: post #46

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?

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…

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.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#66

Post by sheepdestroyer »

watwut wrote: post #42
teekert wrote: post #28

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.

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.

You'll get a pass at being impolite if you are technically in the right...

Here Intel fucked up so they should be really really polite instead.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#67

Post by bashcoder »

StudentStuff wrote: post #44
bashcoder wrote: post #30

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…

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)?

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.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#68

Post by teekert »

watwut wrote: post #42
teekert wrote: post #28

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.

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.

If you want something from someone you ask it politely. If you produce BS, you get told you produce BS. I'm guessing it's a cultural thing I'm also guessing you are an American. Americans coming here often tell us we are very direct and it takes getting used to. We often tell Americans we prefer they speak their mind and don't pretend something is great or we are best friends when it isn't the case. I'm from the Netherlands but I'm guessing Linus has his Finnish roots showing from time to time.

Honestly, it's nice in the US to have waiters/waitresses that are nice, it feels insincere but I prefer it greatly to the sometimes outright moody waiters here. It's a culturing thing as well.

If Intel would be sincere, they would just admin they produced BS (Linus is the best person to call BS on such patches) and apologize to Linus for wasting his time and ask how he would like to see the patches.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#69

Post by walterbell »

Animats wrote: post #31

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.

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

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#70

Post by asplake »

watwut wrote: post #42
teekert wrote: post #28

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.

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.

I’d expect any such approach to take place off list
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