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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.”

#111

Post by azernik »

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…

He's quite clear about his theory as to Intel's motives:

> 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."

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

#112

Post by DangerousPie »

lucb1e wrote: post #89
ryanlol wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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.

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

#113

Post by fooker »

ethani wrote: post #36
integricho wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yea... and what about every other chip maker who also have the same exploits? Can someone explain whether AMD and Qualcomm licensed this tech or if they also independently made the same mistakes? Either way, we really haven't seen much activity from them either.

Nice whattaboutism there.

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

#114

Post by ktta »

Kalium wrote: post #81
beebmam wrote: post #77

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.

Do you think Linus would get a maximally friendly reception if he said: > You clearly mean well. Your heart is in the right place. Thank you so much for all your hard work. There's this weird thing going on where it seems like a bunch of patches experiencing opportunity for improvement are being pushed. These patches also could maybe be better explained. > I don't understand. Can you help me understand, so we can fix…

Like it or not, the common expectation is moving towards what you (sarcastically) wrote, and already much farther away than where Linus is at here.

Linus gets away with it because he's Linus. And surprisingly, I hear even he has toned down a bit.

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

#115

Post by shakna »

beebmam wrote: post #77

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.

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.

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

#116

Post by cm2187 »

bkor wrote: post #104
cm2187 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But are we talking about fixing it on current chips or future chips? If the former I understand Linus’ position only if there is a better solution. But if it is a hardware problem it may not. If we are talking about future chips, I thought that the fix even on 7th and 8th generations had a low overhead. Why would it have a bigger overhead in future designs?

> I thought that the fix even on 7th and 8th generations had a low overhead. One of the fixes slow down kernel syscalls by a significant amount. So much so that your IO will be heavily affected. Intel is mostly responding is dishonest ways, e.g. showing the impact on CPU-only benchmarks. The current patches do have a significant impact! What someone else explained here is that due to the heavy impact, it seems Intel…

To be honest, unless there is a better solution (and I don't think I heard anyone suggesting that Intel could have mitigated it in some other way in older chips), I think it makes sense to make the fix optional.

The vulnerability as I understand it doesn't affect everyone in the same way. Save for the javascript vector which can be easily mitigated (and will be), most consumers and single tenant servers aren't really affected (if you have rogue code executing in user mode, access to kernel memory is the least of your worries, it will have encrypted your data and made your device a spam or DDOS bot before). The risk is really in a large organisation where you need to be resilient to one machine going bad, and in a multi-tenant infrastructure (cloud / hosting providers).

I don't really get the blame game that seems to be at stake here.

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

#118

Post by CodeWriter23 »

ethani wrote: post #36
integricho wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yea... and what about every other chip maker who also have the same exploits? Can someone explain whether AMD and Qualcomm licensed this tech or if they also independently made the same mistakes? Either way, we really haven't seen much activity from them either.

You’re conflating Spectre with Meltdown. Linus’ response is specific to Meltdown, which applies only to Intel chips. Spectre applies to numerous other architectures.

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

#119

Post by eps »

ewi_ wrote: post #99
mpweiher wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and so happy he doesn't follow the kinds of BS rules set out here: https://medium.com/@sandya.sankarram/unlearning-toxic-behavi...

I'd like to believe that one of the reasons Linus has that kind of reaction is because of the scope and impact his decisions and this kind of patches can have on people all around the world. This is a very specific situation, in which the advices in Sandya's article may not apply. However, I fail to see how Sandya's observations are BS. A code review is a place to improve code and oneself, and there's a pretty large…

In many cases it's not a patch that is a problem, it's the submitter and their approach/mindlessness/laziness/ethics that led to the patch being of an unacceptable quality. If you are trying to fix a watch and someone comes and suggest to hit it with a hammer, there's really not much place for being "respectful" with an answer.

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

#120

Post by [deleted] »

ktta wrote: post #114
Kalium wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think Linus would get a maximally friendly reception if he said: > You clearly mean well. Your heart is in the right place. Thank you so much for all your hard work. There's this weird thing going on where it seems like a bunch of patches experiencing opportunity for improvement are being pushed. These patches also could maybe be better explained. > I don't understand. Can you help me understand, so we can fix…

Like it or not, the common expectation is moving towards what you (sarcastically) wrote, and already much farther away than where Linus is at here. Linus gets away with it because he's Linus. And surprisingly, I hear even he has toned down a bit.

[deleted]
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