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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.”

#121

Post by [deleted] »

bashcoder wrote: post #67
StudentStuff wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#122

Post by Kalium »

phyzome wrote: post #106
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…

You and I both know there's a (large) middle ground.

Thank you for saying so and well spotted! You're absolutely right. There is very much a large middle ground.

Is it possible that a middle ground of politely offering carefully tempered criticism might exist? It certainly does! Is it possible that it could potentially lack the same impact as the approach Linus used? This strikes me as also possible. My experience to date is that polite criticism carefully wrapped to avoid being upsetting in any way to someone emotionally invested in their work is often not received with the intended level of urgency.

I'm sure that's just my total ignorance and lack of social graces. Can you please help me understand better?

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

#123

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]

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

#124

Post by izacus »

nolok wrote: post #83
StudentStuff wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are fewer people trying to attack AMD's chips, they comprise such a small chunk of the installed CPU base out there that most attacker's won't be going after a system containing a CPU from AMD. This may change in the next year or two though, at which point the vulns that are likely in their Platform Security Processor may bite them in the ass. Qualcomm on the other hand has taken the "fuck security" approach an…

> Hence why Android phones are often trapped on old versions of Android when launched or shortly thereafter The reason why most android phones don't get upgrades (or only one) to newer android versions has absolutely nothing to do with qualcomm lack of care regarding their cpu's security.

Actually it's one of the major reasons. When Qualcomm stops providing support for a SoC, the OEMs can't update the device even if they wanted to. It's not the only reason, but it is a very major blocker.

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

#125

Post by ageofwant »

mpweiher wrote: post #64
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...

Linus Torvalds stands guard over the the most import bit of human infrastructure ever in the history of the world. I mean that literally. There is no one thing that is so universally important.

If I were Lord God of the cosmos, I'd give Linus Torvalds my magic and go farm Yabbies and sleep like a retired God at night, knowing that the world will be even better in the morning.

Sorry, but being "nice" is totally inappropriate and unhelpful.

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

#126

Post by Cthulhu_ »

joelthelion wrote: post #85
ShabbosGoy wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not only spot, but also invests the energy in calling it out and explaining it. Which is why FOSS is so important. Can you imagine a world where Linux was closed source? You’d never have any insight into security patches, or these discussions.

> FOSS is so important FOSS is nice, but it's not a silver bullet. In this case I think Linus is largely to thank. Things will be a lot harder if he decides to retire.

A silver bullet is having one smart guy at the top who doesn't care how much pressure you exert on getting something into the codebase, or how much man-hours were spent (sunk cost fallacy). I think in a lot of "corporate" projects (not-open source) there's much less of that and the software is designed by commission, with the lead developer(s) quickly no longer having much of an influence on the code itself, being drawn away into meetings and such.

Maybe I'm projecting.

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

#127

Post by [deleted] »

eps wrote: post #119
ewi_ wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#128

Post by 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.

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

#129

Post by ForHackernews »

aidenn0 wrote: post #61
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…

> Intel has no good hardware or microcode mitigation for spectre-like attacks

I was under the impression that for at least one category of attack, there is no hardware mitigation possible because it's a fundamental problem with the x86-64 design. Fixing it would require building a chip that uses some other architecture. Is that not the case?

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

#130

Post by peoplewindow »

Sephr wrote: post #53
Animats wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Microcode is a little more capable than that. See https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9058-everything_you_want_to_know... Edit: s/Intel m/M/

That talk is about AMD.
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