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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.”

#351

Post by hajile »

koheripbal wrote: post #322
jhoechtl wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I full agree with your sentiment. I also see Intel lawyers working overtime, closely interacting with marketing, to somehow ward of lawsuits coming from Google, Microsoft, Amazon, which must be seeking ways out of Intel contracts to turn towards AMD processors for their currently more attractive TCO characteristics. Could be the end of Intel as we know it.

There's no question that Intel's response is entirely dictated by the legal ramifications of the coming lawsuits. ...but irrespective of that, it ALSO appears that there's no leadership within Intel to actually fix the underlying issue. I don't care if the PR is BS - that's what I expect. But if the chips are not fixed the right way, I'm taking my business elsewhere, and I'm not alone.

You face a big issue there. Meltdown is a core architecture issue. It will take a long time to make a fix. Add to that the need for a completely new branch predictor (a notoriously hard design issue) and you're talking about a lot of time. Intel and AMD should already have next years designs done (AMD has said as much with Zen 2). You'll most likely be looking at late 2020 to early 2021 before the fixed architecture is thoroughly tested, taped out, and being produced in volume.

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

#352

Post by [deleted] »

pm wrote: post #205
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linus, like Jobs, is a bully. He lives under the sword. The moment he stops being right, everyone will swiftly turn against them. What separates them is that they're almost never wrong. Not when they pull out "this is garbage" card. This is a difficult ability to learn. You need to stay quiet most of the time, then be a complete asshole when it's important. I really hate that aspect of our industry. But that's just h…

Jobs was a bully who got the big picture right, but often got the details wrong; folklore.org has plenty of stories about people going round Jobs to get shit done. Linus is abrasive, but he usually has a good explanation for why the target of his ire is a moron, e.g. everytime some coder without Linus’ experience suggests converting the kernel codebase to C++. Let’s be honest, most developers are average at best, and…

[deleted]

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

#353

Post by peapicker »

Spooky23 wrote: post #266
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.

Worse still, imagine a world where there was no Linux, and Oracle/Sun happened?

Ironically, Sun might have not had to sell themselves to Oracle, and the world's server's might be running on SPARC chips that are immune to these issues.

Linux is what allowed Intel to get its biggest foothold into the UNIX server market.

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

#354

Post by 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.

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

#355

Post by koheripbal »

hajile wrote: post #351
koheripbal wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no question that Intel's response is entirely dictated by the legal ramifications of the coming lawsuits. ...but irrespective of that, it ALSO appears that there's no leadership within Intel to actually fix the underlying issue. I don't care if the PR is BS - that's what I expect. But if the chips are not fixed the right way, I'm taking my business elsewhere, and I'm not alone.

You face a big issue there. Meltdown is a core architecture issue. It will take a long time to make a fix. Add to that the need for a completely new branch predictor (a notoriously hard design issue) and you're talking about a lot of time. Intel and AMD should already have next years designs done (AMD has said as much with Zen 2). You'll most likely be looking at late 2020 to early 2021 before the fixed architecture…

So are we saying that since nothing is getting fixed in that interim period, that AMD chips suffer much less performance impact due to their lesser exposure to the issue?

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

#356

Post by santoshalper »

sangnoir wrote: post #346
mrmondo wrote: post #195

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 alternat…

I'm fascinated by the lack of self-awareness in your comment: "I wish people in this thread would stop talking about X and talk about Y instead. Anyway, here are my thoughts on X." -_-

It's kind of remarkable.

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

#357

Post by Fnoord »

dpark wrote: post #339
Fnoord wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From what I gather, some of this cultural. His country of origin is just generally blunt and direct about things. I've heard this blunt(/direct/honest) argument quite often (and the same about my country, The Netherlands), but I've also seen Americans in IT who can be very blunt. I attribute it not to country_of_origin, but to the [autism] spectrum.

> ... I've also seen Americans in IT who can be very blunt. I attribute it ... to the [autism] spectrum. Please stop. It's unhealthy to pretend that undesired behaviors in IT are generally the result of autism. It perpetuates an unhealthy culture by essentially saying that guys (because it's only guys who are excused this way) in IT are not responsible for their behavior. It's also insulting to people with autism to…

> It's unhealthy to pretend that undesired behaviors in IT are generally the result of autism.

Not what I did; no need to start bifurcating. What I asserted (or, what I meant) is that people on the spectrum are more common in IT. I never said that everyone in IT is autistic. I never argued Torvalds has autism.

> It perpetuates an unhealthy culture by essentially saying that guys (because it's only guys who are excused this way)

No idea where you got either of these red herrings from. That's certainly not what I asserted.

I do want to note though that women with autism largely go un(der)diagnosed.

> It's also insulting to people with autism

Hi, I have autism, as I acknowledged in another post throughout this thread. There's a rule on HN that you shouldn't assume the worst explanation from a post. Well, you just did, cause why would I willingly try to insult everyone with autism if I have it myself? How that make any sense whatsoever? I don't see at all why my post can be considered offensive unless you resort to things like bifurcations...

> It's also insulting to people with autism to lump their legitimate social difficulties in with people who are simply choosing to be assholes.

People with autism need to function in a non-autistic society. The current therapy I am getting is focussed on that. Using autism as an excuse isn't acceptable; its considered counter-productive.

> There is no indication I see that Torvalds is autistic. He's certainly not socially awkward. He manages an organization of thousands of contributors very effectively.

I don't find him very strong, socially. Read his body language while he's giving a talk. He's shy, at the very least. Just because someone can express themselves easily via e-mail doesn't mean they're not socially awkward.

Also, what I quoted is not mutually exclusive. More importantly, there is no such thing as a binary autism flag; it is a spectrum.

What Torvalds suffers from is that he expresses his anger with unnecessary cursewords in order to give his arguments strength (a fallacy). To name another example: I've never seen RMS do that, but I have seen TdR do that. I find neither of them particularly strong socially, either.

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

#358

Post by kogepathic »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #178
ageofwant wrote: post #117

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.

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.

> I can see it very slowly starting to unravel and quality issues starting to sneak in

I know what you mean here, and I agree with you 100%.

That being said, I can't help but chuckle because if you've ever looked at a vendor's GPL source code for the kernel (Android phone, NAS/router) you know it's the SoCs vendor's old SDK (lots of bodge) with the ODMs additional bodges for their product customizations.

Yes, I am VERY glad that the mainline kernel has Linus and his nose for BS. But just go look at the vendor forks if you want to see some even worse shit than these patches!

Allwinner's GPL is basically garbage. You can find quality rants from tkaiser (Armbian) about this.

MediaTek doesn't even release theirs! Yes, this IS a GPL violation, and no they don't seem to care.

At least Amlogic seems to have woken up and realized an active kernel development community is an asset for them.

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

#360

Post by wyldfire »

mcv wrote: post #160
azernik wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

That bit sounds to me like Intel is trying to pull a "Volkswagen": have it perform better in benchmarks than in real life (when hopefully secure execution will be enabled).

Wow, I can imagine that expression becoming a very compelling analogy in a trial or competitor's marketing.
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