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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.”

#131

Post by DoreenMichele »

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…

From what I gather, some of this is cultural. His country of origin is just generally blunt and direct about things.

That directness is generally associated with multicultural environments where subtler context-dependent communication simply does not work. Some of the quotes I am seeing here from him are things I think are unnecessarily harsh, but most are not.

Discussions about something he has said or written seem to inevitably comment on his speaking style and divide up between those who praise it and those who vilify it. I feel it is mostly a positive, but discussions could benefit from a little context and broader perspective of that detail.

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

#132

Post by Kalium »

cm2187 wrote: post #116
bkor wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

What some have offered up as the ideal approach is to make the fix optional, but default to on.

There might be some level of concern for the consequences of adding to the patch-maintenance load of technical organizations. Already, IT groups and application maintainers cannot always be fully relied upon to have their machine fleets and libraries up to date.

It's also possible that an unpatched machine might suffer from some risk in the form of a significant privilege escalation vulnerability here. Some might opine that any such vulnerability should be closed off wherever possible, as there may be other threats than cryptolockers or botnetting.

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

#133

Post by mrmondo »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #126
joelthelion wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 dr…

It’s an ideological situation to say the least... but it’s also what we have right know and god damn I’m thankful for it’s beautiful rarity.

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

#134

Post by sundvor »

ealexhudson wrote: post #108
smcleod wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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. Som…

Sometimes in a sea of noise it's good to have someone highly qualified shouting to make people sit up and really pay attention. Like now, because it is critically needed.

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

#135

Post by gmueckl »

majewsky wrote: post #110
bashcoder wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorta off-topic, but what did Linus actually do back at Transmeta? Did he contribute to their JIT compiler for x86?

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.

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

#136

Post by c12 »

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)?

I could be very wrong but I read it as Intel trying to cover the fact that there are huge performance penalties with the patch enabled. Therefore Intel will continue to market chip performance sans patch while pushing down the responsibility of enabling them to OS vendors.

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

#137

Post by fsloth »

DangerousPie wrote: post #112
lucb1e wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#138

Post by ageofwant »

jnordwick wrote: post #72
aidenn0 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 val…

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…

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.

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

#139

Post by sundvor »

nolok wrote: post #74
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.

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…

Awesome explanation. That is indeed deserving of the word "f*cked".

My next CPU will be an AMD then.

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

#140

Post by txdv »

sannee wrote: post #79
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.

Note that Intel is a platinum member of the Linux Foundation, which means they donate >=500k$ per year.

Ah, if they stopped now, imagine the PR nightmare.
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