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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.”

#221

Post by 1911z »

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…

Thank you for your explanation.

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

#222

Post by watwut »

brynjolf wrote: post #220
watwut wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1.) I am not American. I am also not talking about Torwalds, because as far as I know Linus did not explicitly demanded to be spoken to "politely" (afaik). 2.) Talking politely and talking directly are orthogonal categories. You can be impolite while not direct and also polite while being direct. 3.) An environment in which people just speak their minds and is ok with people being impolite when those feel like it is…

Boring. Heard it all before.

Is that supposed to mean that you agree, that you think everyone agrees or that you disagree for reason you refuse to say?

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

#223

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

ShabbosGoy wrote: post #48
Roritharr wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only spot, but also invests the energy in calling it out and explaining it. Many business failures i've witnessed happened ultimately because nobody had the energy to cut down the bullshit forest that constantly regrows around a company.

> 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.

In most other FOSS projects people would be afraid to be that frank when referring to Intel's behavior though.

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

#224

Post by tauntz »

tome wrote: post #204
DoreenMichele wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not sure you replied to the correct post since it didn't really seem to be about Linus's style. Anyway, this argument comes up again and again. Regardless of the style in his country and language or origin he is writing in English, in public, for an international audience. One expects a different sort of tone.

> One expects a different sort of tone.

I don't think I can agree with that statement :) I'm part of the target audience and that tone is _exactly_ what I'd expect instead of polite talk that dances around calling out BS for what it is.

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

#225

Post by alerighi »

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…

The problem is that every fix that you could think for Spectre reduces the performance of the CPU.

So not enabling this by default it's a good choice, Spectre is very difficult to exploit: so if you do critical things you enable the fix, if you use the computer for gaming, video rendering, and things where you don't care too much about security but you care about performance, you don't enable it.

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

#226

Post by mmrezaie »

slii wrote: post #211
DoreenMichele wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As a fellow Finn, I agree that our country is probably much more blunt and direct than the impression I get how the US works. That's also the way I like it, and I think you have gone way too far in the US in this politeness thing. However, Finland is culturally quite homogeneous, so I think the reason behind the bluntness is not what you suggest it may be. For a Finn, I think Linus is on the blunt side, but he's not…

Well many years ago his rational (which I agree) was that you should not be vague on the mailing list or people will be confused and Linux Kernel is serious. For all those who do not like this attitude, I point you to the responses coming from Intel/AMD these days. In AMD's response to specture v2, I still cannot understand the text if they say their CPUs are exposed or not. If it wasn't because of the comments in here I would have guessed that they may not.

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

#227

Post by rocqua »

fareesh wrote: post #158

From what I understand of meltdown and spectre, they use a side channel attack to figure out CPU cache values after some speculative execution has been done. Can it not be solved by ensuring that the CPU either clears or purposefully does not cache memory that is read during speculative execution?

I don't think its possible for a CPU to read memory without going through the cache. Moreover, the value of speculative execution drops really hard if you can't use any cache, as it means you are restricted to operating only on registers.

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

#228

Post by icelancer »

piyush_soni wrote: post #214
icelancer wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Being able to call out bullshit doesn't mean having to curse it out. Here we go. >> All Linus needs to do is say something like And all you need to do is be that nice and be as brilliant as Linus is. Oh, it's harder to be that smart than it is to be that nice? Maybe consider that for people as highly gifted as Linus, it actually isn't. What you take for granted as normal behavior isn't always normal to others, esp…

BULLSHIT (I hear you like it). It's about basic etiquette, and treating humans as humans. No amount of gifted skill is a threshold for crossing that behavior barrier.

>>No amount of gifted skill is a threshold for crossing that behavior barrier.

Sure there is. You would rather have Linus in your life who yells at people than not. Linus being an asshole is something you have to deal with to get access to his intelligence. I suggest you make peace with this understanding, as it applies to far more people than Linus.

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

#229

Post by icelancer »

piyush_soni wrote: post #217
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm inclined to disagree on all points. As sundvor already pointed out, Linus's cursing works . He uses it for emphasis, to bring attention to bear where it's needed. Being polite would likely be less effective. > If a specific individual is unable to communicate without that, that's a totally different matter - being able to accommodate a wide church of people is a crucial diversity matter. So shouldn't you be OK wi…

Linus' cursing works because he's Linus, not because he is cursing. There is really no evidence that if he uses strong but less abusive language the work won't get done.

>> There is really no evidence that if he uses strong but less abusive language the work won't get done.

That is because there is no other copy of Linus. There's plenty of other lesser software developers who can't do a tenth of what Linus did in his life.

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

#230

Post by eeeficus »

alerighi wrote: post #225
nolok wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problem is that every fix that you could think for Spectre reduces the performance of the CPU. So not enabling this by default it's a good choice, Spectre is very difficult to exploit: so if you do critical things you enable the fix, if you use the computer for gaming, video rendering, and things where you don't care too much about security but you care about performance, you don't enable it.

Why not the other way around? You have the fix enabled and if you don't know you get protected by default. If you really know better then you can disable the fix (via a special CPU instruction), because you know you're not running anything critical?
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