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

Disabling unsafe behaviour for good on current chips and removing it from future ones would be equally easy, and clearly it isn't Intel's intent.

Plausible reasons, apart from looking good in benchmarks, include ease of access for their three-letter friends and not bothering with the cost of designing safe and high performance processors.

Very specific model - The Bug

Finally, reading that thread further, it does seem like Linus's rant was a little premature & mistaken. David really handles it well & explains in detail in what way Linus may be misunderstanding what's going on. It's hard to know if that response mollified Linus or if he still thinks it's bunk & that thread was just taken offline so that it wouldn't have the noise of useless spectators chiming in, but it seemed like Ingo was perhaps satisfied & moved the conversation back to a way to solve the Skylake problem in a maintainable & clean way without the undesirable implementation that was originally proposed (you know, the whole point of an RFC). An RFC typically means they were looking for feedback & discussion not getting yelled at, especially for things outside their control. That being said, I certainly understand how frustrated everyone is with this given the amount of work that's been put into this by everyone.

Engineering culture is fundamentally about learning from mistakes (either as a community or individually). We can't fear them & there are limits to how much you can go to prevent making them before you just get decision paralysis. For that reason mea culpas are also unproductive. You should acknowledge your actions & your role in it - if you think you behaved incorrectly then of course apologize if you want to - but the person would made mistakes is just as much a victim of their environment as others (i.e. if I threw you into their position without the benefit of hindsight, would you do necessarily do a better job?) Yes corporate America has issues (as does every human endeavour btw) but I'm not convinced that in any way has to do anything with this discussion.

Really? The long technical explanation, with the word "shouty" is not adult? The plea for sensible discussion?

Your post isn't worth responding to beyond that. You've taken extreme liberties in your reading of his response. "Directly insulting Linus" lmfao are you fucking kidding me? You're calling "shouty" as directly insulting, when it's a response to "Fucking morons" writing "garbage" code? This is disingenuous at best if not willfully ignorant.

Cheap jokes about Linus's behavior?????

Seriously, take a step back and realize the loops you're jumping through to try to somehow justify Linus's behavior by attacking a reasoned response to it.

I linked to a far more informative post that actually discusses a technical issue. Frankly, the response should have been what was linked on HN, not some rant.

I can't believe the irony of telling me to "chill out" with personal attacks when commenting on a rant that is majority perosnal attacks.

I’m not defending Linus per se, but he do have a really unique position and it’s probably not easy to be in that position and AFAIKT it works. Maybe if it would have been someone else the world would look, most probably, rather different.

It’s really easy to criticize, but frankly none of us knows how it is to be in his situation and I guess he has to deal with his fair share of trolls, morons and energy thieves.

There is no separating out corporate culture from the fact that it is a corporation. FOSS is not a for profit corporation. Expecting it to function like one is not reasonable. Trying to impose corporate culture as the standard for FOSS is not only not reasonable, it is counterproductive.

If you want corporate software, cool. But if you want FOSS to exist at all, there has to be a fundamental acceptance of the fact that it will have a different culture and a different process.

I will add that his cussing spree here is in response to a for profit corporation trying to shit all over his project. But, hey, must be totes okay for them to shit on it since they didn't use any cuss words or raise their voice.

There is your so called corporate etiquette right there.

If that is really the case, then calling the engineers morons is actually very much called for!

Its worked so far.

Purely anecdotal evidence, but in my experience the few pieces of hardware that I can generally bet they'll be fine with Linux are those branded Intel or NVidia (one may argue about the "optimus" thing, but if you want CUDA on a Linux laptop, nvidia's drivers do their job fine in the end, and this is what most Linux users will care about I guess)

Dunno the mechanics of it, but some things did work up just right about this :)

A sensible mail discussing the details of some obscure technicality doesn't make HN frontpage.

An "inclusive atmosphere" is irrelevant. Pointless. I'd personally say it's counter-productive. There's no scenario where Torvalds' response is going to result in Intel abandoning the Linux ecosystem. The engineers at Intel can now go back to their managers and say "okay, we tried cutting corners and it didn't work."

That's a very dangerous and messed up reasoning. For a significant proportion of the population "society" is just a nasty scheme we put up with since we know not better way of not killing each other or exterminating ourselves as a species... Having to contort and torture one's personality just so you can be "socially adept" is a great pain, and when one occasionally gets away with being able not to do this it's NOT "a personality flaw".

One ought to care firstly for developing his/her personality in whichever way himself sees fit. If it doesn't fit well with society it's not a "flaw"!

(Yeah, if goes overboard and results in a team totally breaking up... even that is not a big deal! Some companies are worth breaking up into pieces. Heck, as long as people aren't literally killing each other it's still not "a flaw". Stop being insensitive and discriminating against people with other notions of relating themselves with the thinggy we call "society" and perpetuating this oppressive culture of admonishing people for being "socially inept". Maybe those people have something better to do with their lives!)

It’s never going to be nice to hear.

In lessening the blow you lose the message. You lose the true meaning. You lie.

This is not clear enough and could be interpreted as incompetence on the part of the speaker

In fact, the idea that you’re even bringing up such minor language at such a time really disappoints me.

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, especially those at the outliers of skill and intelligence.

Let's not highlight this nonsense hoax. It isn't how embargoes work and is obviously people just trying to jump on the hype train.

When I read his reply, I could feel the pain. I imagined I would reply back to him and say "well fuck you too." When I finished reading the email, regardless of who is more right or more wrong, I can understand and feel his frustration. I would absolutely go mad if someone messes with something I care about, and then have the guts to do fact checks.

But I still think there is room to offer an olive branch, honestly. But given how busy he is, and how many shitty patches they get, I can understand his frustration.

That being said, it almost seems like no one other than him, can do a better job in keeping up with the quality if he has to be the one yelling all the time. When Linus is no longer involved (for any reasons), can Linux kernel project continues to have quality code?

A couple years ago Linus shared his views on insult: respect should be earned. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ017D_JOPY

Worth watching.

And in the unlikely event that your theory regarding undisclosed vulnerabilities is true, this will certainly make them think twice about leaving Linus out of the loop again, no?

Sometimes this is actually necessary to get heard, and have the issue taken seriously. It helps providing the feedback that something REALLY wrong just happened and needs to be addressed immediately.

Imagine a sergeant talking to a trainee. What's the most efficient ?

- "Dear soldier, I think the way you handle your weapon is going to get you killed in a few moment. You should probably change that appropriately. If I may provide you this advice, of corse."

- "Stop this shit now! You're going to shoot yourself!"

A thoughtful comment would have illuminated the issue, explained why the fixes were too broad or not specific enough, and how they could be improved.

The average person is insecure about more advanced details of tech topics, yet still needs to use laptops and smartphones to survive in modern society. That is the vast majority of people, and those are the people you should be the most worried about, because those people decide whether Intel will ultimately get away with this or not.

And honestly, with that in mind your remark looks like a thinly-veiled snobbish remark about how you don't fall for any of that.

Qualcomm on the other hand has taken the "fuck security" approach and failed to clean up their code and get it mainlined for nearly all of their common SoCs. Hence why Android phones are often trapped on old versions of Android when launched or shortly thereafter, long term security through the device lifecycle is a bad joke when Qualcomm and most other ARM vendors are involved.

- ancient rivers of money

- The Return of the Barbarian

- Can Hydras eat unknown unknowns for lunch

There is also a more recent one where he writes about young people and their attitudes about money and property ownership and "life scripts" that was here on HN and metafilter and other places but I don't know the name of it ... was quite good.

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.

It's a sad thing to say about the state of the human specie.

Damn you, Wintel!

While I think you've also been bitten by the "we accept everyone! (who thinks the way we do)" crowd as well, this is not the place or the way to express that frustration.

Now, however, it's nearly worthless. Anyone can do distribution, both of work and of end products, with very little effort thanks to computers and the Internet. Now, the limitations of those corporate structures are starting to cut deeper and not be compensated for. Their assumption of all of the tremendous failings of in-person human communication (that 'broken telephone' you mention is only part of it, there's also the inherent prejudices and irrational means of influence at play which are inescapable) in combination with both voluntarily abandoning essentially every single benefit they ever offered to employees and the inherent limitations in such a centralized structure will result in them falling apart. I mean, if the market has anything to say about it. Back when factories got big people accepted things like limitations in variety of goods, limited to nil personalization, etc because supporting those things was difficult for factories. Such is still difficult for large companies. They have executives who want to impress 'grand visions' upon the company so that they have some excuse (both personal and professional) to collect such absurdly overlarge compensation.

The human brain, by the way, is limited to keeping around 150 people in mind and maintaining stable relationships with them. It's called 'Dunbar's Number' and while there's certainly variation amongst different people with regard to it, I think we can safely presume there is no one with the ability to maintain and consider 1000+ stable relationships. That this is not reflected in our social structures is probably an error.

Anytime someone suggests that my directness means I must be autistic, they are a) making a faux polite personal attack that calls me a social retard and b) looking for an excuse to ignore and dismiss the substance of my points. I don't consider it to be a good faith form of engagement.

I used to try to be tactful with everything I would say, but that ended up in a 4 hour discussion / argument with someone who was digging in their heels about something they were wrong about. Huge waste of time and energy. It would blow a whole day.

When someone is being blunt with me, I take the time to make sure my response is clear and concise. It certainly has it's advantages. I try to keep the swears to a minimum. I'm not a drill sergeant, but I definitely make my point clearly and forcefully.

FWIW, I save the bluntness for important stuff.

I'm probably still too verbose (ha... "probably"... I flatter myself), but I went through a phase in my late teens and early twenties where I qualified and wrapped in polite circumlocutions everything I wrote. It makes in incomprehensible, honestly, and it doesn't work anyhow. I still got flamed. (Good ol' Usenet.)

There's a time and a place for politeness. That time and place is most times and most places. There's a time and a place for directness, bluntness, and even outright impoliteness; I'd submit "Intel is just going to leave a critical vulnerability in basically every CPU in the world, and throw up an obfuscating cover of flags and workarounds and PR to try to pretend otherwise" is a reasonable time for those things.

(Personally, I don't expect miracles. Intel ought to come out and say "Look, this is going to take some years. Here's some workarounds in the meantime, and here's our plan going forward." I think everyone who understands the situation understands that a true fix is very difficult. But if it looks like they're going to try to skate by on some weak workarounds and a heavy dollop of PR, the industry as a whole really needs to pushback, not just Linus.)

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 lump their legitimate social difficulties in with people who are simply choosing to be assholes.

If a salesperson or marketer or artist or executive is blunt/rude/an asshole, no one assumes it's because they're autistic. It's assumed that this is part of their personality, because they find it more effective to communicate this way (or in some cases, that they're simply bullies).

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. If he's blunt or rude, it's because he chooses to be.

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.

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 that public bluntness has so far not had a measurable negative perception impact for Linux, then it seems inevitable that the project will be an exception to expectations.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context...

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 knowledge is our status play. Scoring points against Linus’ decisions are one way to get you noticed, which makes him a target. If I had to deal with that shit everyday, I would do my best to discourage point scorers by putting them in their place as well.

I hope you aren't under the impression that Linus stays quietly and waits for the perfect victim.

> (I'm sure whoever came up with the current design isn't too happy about Linus calling it garbage, but they'll just have to deal with it.)

Or maybe whoever came up with the design was aware it was garbage from inception, there's no need to pity them gratuitously.

I think we generate less hackernews-worthy drama posts overall because when someone is repeatedly abusive, they're asked privately to stop/apologize, and if they keep at it, they risk being kicked from the project.

With hundreds of contributors and a weak hierarchy, no one person is too important to be kicked.

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 not convinced i need to worry.

And making non public facing machines pay the price of the mitigation seems like too much.

But as I've learned more about how this community works, I understand that "Why does HN [do this thing I don't like]?" is not a valid question.

HN is a vast community of many different people who think and behave differently.

Sometimes a few more people will downvote your comment than will upvote it, either because they disagree with your point or they dislike the way you expressed it.

But when you complain about downvotes, you lose multiple times over: you fail to contemplate and reflect on how your answer could have been better, you come across like a bad sport, and you break the site guidelines [1].

In this case, it seems like people just disagree with your claim and have explained why in replies.

No big deal, all you need to do is reply politely to demonstrate the correctness of your point.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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 characterized by everyone speaking is mind or being impolite, not just your hero. Meaning, you will not put emphasis on "be polite" when someone you dont like asks for something.

3.) I am pointing out the difference between how people who are not Torwalds demand that you talk to mailing list and what they defend as "good way to communicate" by people they admire. Because actual openly speaking culture is symmetric.

I agree with you in general, but that's a bad example IMO. If they are stressed out and make honest mistakes, even if they're totally incompetent and stupid, I would probably laugh harder each subsequent time and assure them it's no big deal, and it would be true. With anyone, but doubly so with anyone who handles my food.

If on the other hand they just didn't care etc., I'd leave at some point and never return. The point at which there would be something to get nasty about is also past the point where it would still make sense to be nasty about it, if you know what I mean.

Not that I think Linus is being particularly nasty, and as I said, I generally agree. But that example rubbed me the wrong way, I just had to speak up, sorry ^^

If I would be hungry, I would be angry, but I would still not insult them and there is no rational reason to do so. I can control my anger in easy restaurant situatuon like that. At worst, I would leave.

Linus yelling at a former rep of Intel isn't enough to cause them to do something that stupid.

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.

I'm sure there is some lawyer there who says "we'll have to go through motions to protect against a lawsuit". But legal reasons do not make for good technology, or good patches that I should apply.

He is still ofcourse mad that they don't seem like they want to fix Spectre correctly but that seems tangential to how pissed he is that they are trying to get code merged that clearly does something other than just mitigate Spectre.

Unfortunately this entire thread is derailed with garbage about how Linus talks, rather than the fact he thinks Intel is doing something really fucking dodgy here and we should all try work out what it is.

One obvious approach would be to have two caches per core. Speculative execution would use a different cache than normal execution. If the speculative action is committed to, it swaps which cache is the normal one and which is the speculative one. Then you'd also need to flush the branch predictor on context changes. And a few other issues.

Nothing that's impossible to do, but it would require a huge amount of new design and a lot more silicon just to maintain the performance of current chips without mitigation.

The reason he refuses those current patches and directly call it a lie/deception is because of what my last two paragraphs related; if you read his message (where the link points to) it's about half way: Intel tries to disguise it by doing it in a convoluted way. Basically they try to avoid making it obvious when looking at the code, because they don't want a "if (intel_chip) enable_fix_because_default_is_broken_on_intel();" and instead pushes something that looks like the kernel needs to do lots of complex stuff [aka, "it's complex, and a fix-on-chip is not enough the kernel needs protection anyway !", and that means a terrible patch with lots of garbage and filler code.

Intel's intention is clear in that they specifically pushes this in the same patchset as the "tell the chip to be secure", trying to mush the two things together to make it looks like it's all the same thing, whereas in reality it should be two patchset: one to enable the security mode, and bad for intel marketing wise. And a second one to add those "fixes" to the kernel, that would be refused because terrible and in part unecessary since retpoline already protects it. What Linus is saying is "sure I need the first change, but since you're intent on pushing them together I'm refusing them, because the second one is pure garbage, and you mix them together to hide the first".

Eg quotes from said mail to show it's indeed his problem:

> So instead they try to push the garbage down to us. And they are doing it entirely wrong, even from a technical standpoint.

and

> The patches do things like add the garbage MSR writes to the kernel entry/exit points. That's insane. That says "we're trying to protect the kernel". We already have retpoline there, with less overhead.

(what he means here is that they try in their patch to make it look like the kernel needs a special protection, while it already has it through retpoline)

and

> So somebody isn't telling the truth here. Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons. Sorry for having to point that out. If this was about flushing the BTB at actual context switches between different users, I'd believe you. But that's not at all what the patches do.

(eg "why are you pushing all this crap around to hide what's really happening/need to be executed")

- In newer CPU's. There should be mitigations against these attacks. That would probably seriously hurt intel by delaying their future processor launches

- In Older/existing CPU's through microcode updates. Bar literally making "fixed" versions of every Intel CPU in the last 10~ years. This is the only way to resolve the issue on existing hardware

Instead of doing that. Intel wants to avoid the much-reported "30% performance hit" by simply saying "Well if you want this FEATURE, you can enable it in your OS!"

Intel is trying to downplay a massive security vulnerability in their hardware as something that OS vendors can just let users opt in/out of

From what I've seen. There's been demonstrated attacks using Javascript in Chrome to dump the saved passwords from the browser using these bugs

If an attack is that easy to pull off, I don't think it's reasonable to make it an "opt in"

IIRC the beeping at least of four-letter-words has to be done to avoid higher PG-ratings and/or fines from the FCC. Not much to do there.

Don’t tell Linus!

Especially when you use the 'suggesting' feature. It's a bit like a mini-PR for your docs.

Google Wave was supposed to be really good for this---better than email.

The worst part being Exchange/Outlook users whose quoting system is braindead and has the uncanny power to routinely throw off any form of automated top-posting quote folding detection, making for a terrible reading experience in MUAs that support threading properly, as well as said users making heavy use of a Word-afflicted form of interleaved posting that consists of using colors and sizes to reply inline within the quoted part. On the same line no less.

Please for the love of all that is holy could someone in vicinity of the Outlook team add support for "quote-this-selected-text" and "{in,de}crease-quote-level" as well as prefixing the full-quote with a proper marker instead of going full-on Z̭͕͕͘a͠l̛̬̮͇g̪̩͜o͏̹͚̯͖̜ͅ.

[0]: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/T/top-post.html

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style

Doing otherwise would throw the onus onto kernel maintainers for Windows, Linux, and the various BSD distros, and they don't want a crapton of one off fixes for the plethora of CPU errata that Intel and others patch in microcode.

Edit: s/Intel m/M/

Compiler has large effect. Common operations like CALL and PUSH go trough microcode even in m64 but there are alternatives. Many floating point operations have assists. Nonoptimal memory alignment might go trough microcode.

Is it possible that a middle ground of politely offering carefully tempered criticism might exist? It certainly does! Is it possible that it could potentially lack the same impact as the approach Linus used? This strikes me as also possible. My experience to date is that polite criticism carefully wrapped to avoid being upsetting in any way to someone emotionally invested in their work is often not received with the intended level of urgency.

I'm sure that's just my total ignorance and lack of social graces. Can you please help me understand better?

Exactly, it's cultural.

And, I wouldn't call it ranting. If you look at Linus' famous examples of this, he may first call it bullshit (calling it as it is), and then he goes on to explain why it is, and usually also explains how to polish the turd into what it should have been.

It certainly works in my experience, having been on both ends of this sort of communication.

It tells you that your quality has fallen well and truly below the expected level of output.

But it isn't something held against you either. Because in these same cultures, it is okay to make a mistake, even costly ones. Because they make you better.

I've shown you that what you made is crap, and why it is crap. So now I know that you know that sort of thing is crap, and will strive to make something better. And you also know I won't turn around tomorrow and remind you of it, because you're passed it. Probably not even in jest.

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 isn't planning to fix it in future CPU's. Basically a "if you are super security minded enable that special slow secure mode Linux has where they slow down your performance". Meaning, blame Linux/your requirements not Intel.