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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.”

#471

Post by dwmw2 »

wilun wrote: post #447
kbenson wrote: post #430

And here[1] is Woodhouse's coherent latest reply as of a couple hours ago on the issue, which explains for all us in the peanut gallery (his words, which I think are spot on) exactly what this is about, why it's included, how it actually affects the situation, why it was put forth at all, etc. It appears much less sinister than Linus was insinuating, but Linus has yet to reply. 1: http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/k…

That's an interesting summary but I predict that Linus will destroy him for completely avoiding the hard question: why the fuck IBRS_ALL would not be on by default on future "fixed" chips, if on such CPU it would not be somehow crappy. And the risk of it becoming architectural (with that absurd default) is insane too.

Why would he do that? I completely agree with him on that, and I already told him I've been pushing back on it since I first heard about it a few weeks ago. Although there are technical reasons why we might need IBRS_ALL as a stop-gap before we can get to a proper solution, we bloody well ought to have line-of-sight to a proper solution in the same way that RDCL_NO says "it's OK, we fixed it" for Meltdown.

But that's a separate topic. As I explicitly said, I limited that answer to the things we can do on current hardware.

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

#472

Post by opportune »

idbehold wrote: post #418
pmlnr wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there is no proper fix. The only fix comes with massive slowdown.

You just contradicted yourself.

Not really. There is a fix. It is not "proper" because after implementing it, few businesses and people will continue to buy Intel products

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

#473

Post by aidenn0 »

cryptonector wrote: post #432
ageofwant wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You have secrets, some of them worth a lot: - cookies (e.g., for online banking sessions) - keys (e.g., for pushing to git repos) - browser history - identities (oh, did you post anonymously somewhere?) - ... PoC code that runs in-browser exists. It's only a matter of time before it's weaponized.

That's spectre, not meltdown with the in-browser PoC

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

#474

Post by kakarot »

sgc wrote: post #245
kakarot wrote: post #218

So somebody isn't telling the truth here. Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons. Sorry for having to point that out. As it is, the patches are COMPLETE AND UTTER GARBAGE. They do literally insane things. They do things that do not make sense. That makes all your arguments questionable and suspicious. The patches do things that are not sane. Is Linus suggesting these patches are so bad that there co…

He certainly doesn't think it is a mistake. And that would fall within the spectrum of possibilities, but I would doubt anyone considers that as a probable reason, since it would be stupid to push something like that right now. Like future-destroying stupid.

But if he doesn't think it's a mistake... what could it be?

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

#475

Post by eecc »

plorkyeran wrote: post #389
eecc wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

more or less... I'm surprised the CPU doesn't already flush caches after speculative execution branches are abandoned

Flushing the cache after every branch misprediction would probably make branch prediction a net loss in performance.

Well not all caches, just the part tagged with the mispredicted branch

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

#476

Post by [deleted] »

cdelsolar wrote: post #451
catach wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in English, in public, for an international audience. One expects a different sort of tone. I agree that this is true, but two points stick out to me: 1. Generally the motive for this convention stems from organizations wanting to sanitize their image. 2. FOSS project communication is overwhelmingly pubic. If we accept that all organizations need some amount of blunt communication at some point, and if we accept th…

I'm sorry, but "overwhelmingly pubic" is one of the funnier typos I've seen.

[deleted]

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

#477

Post by chr1 »

PopsiclePete wrote: post #436
ChuckMcM wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a serious concern. If Linus were replaced by someone more pliable/less attentive Linux will have a serious problem.

That's the problem with "rockstars and "benevolent dictators", the Linuses and the Elon Musks, isn't it? Everything is great until they go away for whatever reason and nobody can fill the void. Hell, there's people still doubting Tim Cook on whether he can fill Jobs' shoes. I wonder if something like FreeBSD is better suited for sustainability - from what I can tell, there's no "dictator" figure there, no critical si…

That's more of a problem with _not_ having them. When you lose prominent contributors you notice how the things were better before, but you are still better off than you would be if they never existed.

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

#478

Post by karambahh »

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.

What about *BSD ? How are they managing their kernels and other important decisions?

I know next to nothing about the BSD communities, my only interaction with the BSD is discussing the taste of a pizza Theo de Raadt and I shared about 20 years ago and young me had no idea who he was. I later heard he is at the helm of OpenBSD and is used to strongly defend his opinions but it is only hearsay.

I have no idea how FreeBSD or OpenBSD communities are organized but I suspect they might not be relying on one specific individual for their major decisions?

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

#479

Post by dom96 »

yorwba wrote: post #264
yoz-y wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren’t most independant benchmarks run on OSes that are already patched?

Not with those patches, since they haven't been merged yet. The performance decreases that have been reported so far are for Meltdown patches, those new patches are apparently meant to mitigate Spectre.

Spectre affects AMD as well, how have they been handling this?

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

#480

Post by dvanduzer »

xxs wrote: post #335
awakeasleep wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow I didn’t think of that but what if a woman wrote the code in that patch? Linus would be making her feel unwelcome.

There are prior examples of his writing style offending a lady who turned to actually had a pretty potty mount, herself, as well.

As long as a person doesn't pretend they've never been cruel to another person, it isn't hypocritical to call for more kindness. There is also a huge difference between using salty language to emphasize when something is massively complicated versus emphasis when calling someone a huge idiot.

As far as this particular Torvalds screed goes, it strikes me as measured for him. He is very clear about what he wants more of and what he wants less of. It's the code that is garbage, and he doesn't get overly personal other than to chide Woodhouse for glossing over the quality of Woodhouse's own contributions.

edit: ahh right, "mis-designed by morons" which is pretty inflammatory, and he should do better than that. I suspect he is trying to provoke someone at Intel into explaining their intent. Insult their intelligence, and they'll reveal something about their (possibly sinister) motive.

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