In a public email chain, the Linux inventor Linus Torvalds, and David Woodhouse, engineer at Amazon in the UK discuss Intel's "fix" for Meltdown/spectre. Never one to pull punches Torvalds exclaims "the patches are COMPLETE AND UTTER GARBAGE."
I can't even pretend to understand the technical parts of Linus' emails, but it's pretty obvious to see, the man isn't happy with what Intel is doing to fix the problem. From what I can gather, Intel is putting things in the patch that are unnecessary or redundant to make it look more substantial, while having the actual fix not be enabled by default. Linus' speculation on why it is not enabled by default is it would make Intel "look bad in benchmarks." Thanks to fightingfi for the story
All of this is pure garbage. Is Intel really planning on making this shit architectural? Has anybody talked to them and told them they are f*cking insane. Please, any Intel engineers here - talk to your managers. If the alternative was a two-decade product recall and giving everyone free CPUs, I'm not sure it was entirely insane.
I can't even pretend to understand the technical parts of Linus' emails, but it's pretty obvious to see, the man isn't happy with what Intel is doing to fix the problem. From what I can gather, Intel is putting things in the patch that are unnecessary or redundant to make it look more substantial, while having the actual fix not be enabled by default. Linus' speculation on why it is not enabled by default is it would make Intel "look bad in benchmarks." Thanks to fightingfi for the story
All of this is pure garbage. Is Intel really planning on making this shit architectural? Has anybody talked to them and told them they are f*cking insane. Please, any Intel engineers here - talk to your managers. If the alternative was a two-decade product recall and giving everyone free CPUs, I'm not sure it was entirely insane.
Last edited: