Linus Torvalds is furious at Intel over its handling of the current processor security flaw

[JohnMiller92]

1 minute ago, Stefan Payne said:

Yes, and?!

I use strong language sometimes too because if you are friendly to the other one you get ignored.

So I can totally understand where he's coming from and why he does it.

 

 

So to make it clear:
If you are nice and friendly either nobody takes you serious or you get ignored.

If you use strong language, its more likely that people will react to you.

Oh bologna. Look at Chris Wilson from Grinding Gear Games. Everyone takes him seriously and he's one of the nicest lead developers ever in the gaming industry. Same can apply to software/os industry as well.

[Stefan Payne]

1 minute ago, JohnMiller92 said:

Oh bologna. Look at Chris Wilson from Grinding Gear Games. Everyone takes him seriously and he's one of the nicest lead developers ever in the gaming industry. Same can apply to software/os industry as well.

I have no idea who that is. And don't want to know. But the way you phrase it I assume he is as nice as Destiny (the Gamer)...

 

 

The thing is that its also a fine art. You can use strong language but should not use namecalling and shit like that. Especially if it is factually wrong.

 

[JohnMiller92]

1 minute ago, Stefan Payne said:

I have no idea who that is. And don't want to know. But the way you phrase it I assume he is as nice as Destiny (the Gamer)...

 

 

The thing is that its also a fine art. You can use strong language but should not use namecalling and shit like that. Especially if it is factually wrong.

 

Well, you can still be very smart and an ass. I'm not discrediting Linus at all, just pointing out why don't you call a spade a spade?

[Drak3]

10 minutes ago, Stefan Payne said:

you are nice and friendly either nobody takes you serious or you get ignored.

If you use strong language, its more likely that people will react to you.

There's a difference between being assertive and being an asshole.

Torvalds falls into the second.

[JohnMiller92]

15 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

There's a difference between being assertive and being an asshole.

Torvalds falls into the second.

  I   find it funny how people cannot admit he's an asshole, lol. I mean, no need to hide it  

[Mira Yurizaki]

1 hour ago, Drak3 said:

There's a difference between being assertive and being an asshole.

Torvalds falls into the second.

To be fair, he did apologize for his "strong rant" against that security engineer.

 

But on the flipside, Torvalds has to be hard on the kernel development community. If Torvalds were softer, Linux would become a steaming pile of shit.

[Mira Yurizaki]

Also even when Torvalds does make a strong statement about something, he usually at least backs it up with something reasonably sound. For instance one of the first eyebrow raisers I had when reading the Linux Kernel Coding Style guide is this

Quote

Tabs are 8 characters, and thus indentations are also 8 characters. There are heretic movements that try to make indentations 4 (or even 2!) characters deep, and that is akin to trying to define the value of PI to be 3.

Which I thought that was too wide. I still think so, because I do what I want, as long as it's consistent and not do something too dumb like make tabs single space. But Torvalds does address complaints like that with this:

Quote

In short, 8-char indents make things easier to read, and have the added benefit of warning you when you’re nesting your functions too deep.

Which makes sense. If you're nesting your if-statements and whatnot, you should rethink how you're doing something.

 

And the 8 character tab is not exactly an arbitrary thing Torvalds came up with. From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_key#Tab_characters

Quote

The intention was to have the printers be programmed with control characters to set and clear the stops: ISO 6429 includes the codes 136 (Horizontal Tabulation Set), 137 (Horizontal Tabulation with Justification) and 138 (Vertical Tabulation Set). In practice, settable tab stops were rather quickly replaced with fixed tab stops, de facto standardized at every multiple of 8 characters horizontally, and every 6 lines vertically.

[NumLock21]

22 hours ago, Misanthrope said:

Well he did posted a pretty damning rant about intel too:

 

 

Instead of singing in the rain, it's ranting in the rain.

 

[Drak3]

59 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

If Torvalds were softer, Linux would become a steaming pile of shit.

Outside of the LTS and the utmost current kernals, Torvalds isn't heavily involved in maintaining them.

And what he says only affects the official releases. Not release candidates that developers come up with and the distro maintaining groups may use.

 

Torvalds is NOT the reason Linux is or isn't a steaming pile of shit.

[Juanitology]

On 1/4/2018 at 4:15 PM, potoooooooo said:

I mean he's not wrong, but why is he relevant? When's the last time linus torvalds did something actually newsworthy?

wtf kind of question is this? Why is he relevant? Maybe because he's an expert on the subject with decades of experience in the industry and definitely in the top 10 of the must influential programmers in history?

[Drak3]

14 minutes ago, Terodius said:

he's an expert on the subject with decades of experience in the industry

He developed a basic kernal. Others made something truly usable out of it.

 

He's no more an expert than a grunt dev at Microsoft or Apple.

[Juanitology]

5 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

He developed a basic kernal. Others made something truly usable out of it.

 

He's no more an expert than a grunt dev at Microsoft or Apple.

First of all, clearly you have no programming experience if you think developing a stable, usable, highly performing kernel is easy. But let's ignore the fact that he's got multiple degrees and decades of experience coding. He's still one of the most influential figures in the history of the open source movement. That gives him a pretty loudspeaker to comment on current events in the industry, and his competence and trajectory is why people respect him and find him trustworthy. 

[mynameisjuan]

3 minutes ago, Terodius said:

no programming experience if you think developing a stable, usable, highly performing kernel is easy. But let's ignore the fact that he's got multiple degrees and decades of experience coding.

This is exactly why his point means shit. He codes kernals while intel develops the chips to run it. Two different worlds. The dude cant figure out how to uninstall a fucking program in linux, yet he should be highly regarded when it comes to advice to CPU engineers? Cmon....

[Bit_Guardian]

7 hours ago, Stefan Payne said:

This shit shouldn't have happened in the first place!
The issue here is kinda similar to the VW Exaust scandal. And should be handeled in a similar way.

 

In this case Intel sacrificed safety/security for Performance. And that is why they are better than 'the others', because they cheated, with a technic that should have never been used because its so unsafe...

 

 

Oh and another thing:
Intel knew since June or July!!

 

So what happened at Intel between June/July and now??

 

They introduced two(!!!) CPU Lines!

Skylake-X and Coffeelake while knowing about this issue!

 

 

Don't you think that this needs to be called out?!

Oh BS. ARM TrustZone has equally damning security vulnerabilities. You just don't see them reported on. There are always bugs in any binary logic system (software and hardware are mathematically equivalent, see NP HARD and co-reducibility of SAT and Circuit-SAT), always. That a serious one escaped scrutiny for so long is merely a game of chance.

 

Sacrificed? No. If you think about it, Intel's branch predictor (responsible for this bug) has been more than 90% accurate for a very long time. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Sure they may have tweaked the edges to squeeze out more performance, but why fundamentally redo the design if it's stellar? It was developed in an age where no one would have begun thinking of exploiting a branch predictor to access kernel space. No chip maker from Intel to Rockchip actually fully redesigns a core with each generation. Lead time would go from 1 year to 5. It's unfortunate, but it's inevitable that bugs be found. Just wait. AMD will eventually suffer the same fate if they live long enough.

 

No, it doesn't, because Intel was hard at work helping companies write kernel patches all that time, and as nuanced as this attack is, the chance that anyone found it in the last decade besides Google's research consortium is quite low.

[Bit_Guardian]

6 hours ago, Stefan Payne said:

You have never heard him Talk, have you?!
 

Here the full lenght nVidia Video:

 

He doesn't seem to be an ass. Quite the contary.
He is just very direct but seems rather nice.

Yeah, but you've never worked with him. I have. Even if your code beats his current favorite in a benchmark and passes all of the security and regression tests, If you disagree with him, your code won't be allowed in.

 

Many prominent members of the Linux Foundation want him gone and with good reason. He's past his prime and his usefulness.

[mr moose]

10 hours ago, Sauron said:

He's not complaining because the bug exists, he's complaining because the way the cpus were designed makes this hard to fix and not addressable through a microcode update,

 

Maybe he should show Intel how to design a CPU without said bug.  Hindsight is awesome, but if Linus is using it to prove a point it only makes him a monday's expert.

[Bit_Guardian]

4 hours ago, mr moose said:

 

Maybe he should show Intel how to design a CPU without said bug.  Hindsight is awesome, but if Linus is using it to prove a point it only makes him a monday's expert.

Yup. Welcome to the arrogance of SOME systems programmers. You don't see Richard Stallman smearing the world's various processor designers over these three bugs. You don't see Herb Sutter (Microsoft OS and Visual Studio Senior  Architect) Andre Alexandrescu (Facebook Senior Software Engineer and BSD kernel contributor) Stefan Lavavej (see Herb Sutter) Titus Winters (Google chief architect OS and distributed systems) Chandler Carruth (Android and Clang senior developer) taking pot shots either, and I've seen their talent put up against Torvalds. He needs to ride off into the sunset and be silent. Let the world take this seriously instead of stroking his ego.

 

Intel is still the only GPU provider with a fully open-source driver stack on both Windows and Linux (probably BSD too). Intel has delivered more open source software under Apache and MIT licenses than any of the big 6 (includes Nvidia, AMD, IBM, Oracle, and ARM) which has pushed software innovation forward in ways even most programmers are completely unaware of. Intel is still providing way more money to university research groups than Nvidia and IBM combined. Intel made a mistake and assumed a good model for 10 years. Torvalds made a mistake which allowed for the Dirty-COW bug which went undetected for 6 years even by the enormous Linux Community. Shit happens.

 

If Torvalds dropped dead tomorrow, the Linux Community would mourn, but they'd lose no one crucial to Linux's future success, only its past glories.

[Master Disaster]

On 04/01/2018 at 7:52 PM, Primefoxer said:

Linus Torvalds, dislikes Nvidia and now Intel, he is the one that AMD 'fanboys' will worship. That is until he also voices his dislike on them too.

Which is ironic considering AMD GPUs run that shit on Linux.

[Bit_Guardian]

7 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

Which is ironic considering AMD GPUs run that shit on Linux.

What's even more Ironic is Intel has done incredibly far more for the open source world, especially with having a completely open-source GPU driver stack, than AMD has. OpenMP, OpenACC, Thread Building Blocks, CilkPlus, Intel Math Kernel Library, HPX, and of course, being among the top three companies constantly contributing to the Linux and BSD kernels.

 

Torvalds needs to drop dead, metaphorically speaking ofc, when it comes to voicing his opinions when he hasn't contributed a damn thing in 5 years and is far and away not a hardware expert.

[jagdtigger]

11 hours ago, Bit_Guardian said:

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

The problem is that it is broken, and in a very serious way... Are you paid by intel to try to belittle this gaping hole in security or hat?

[Bit_Guardian]

3 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

The problem is that it is broken, and in a very serious way... Are you paid by intel to try to belittle this gaping hole in security or hat?

Please read what you quoted in its full context...

 

NO ONE REMOTELY BELIEVED OR HAD REASON TO BELIEVE IT WAS BROKEN

 

is the bottom line. Intel has had the highest performing branch predictor in the world for at least 5 years. No one even began looking at exploiting speculative execution until 3 years ago.

 

No tech company has had a perfect run, none. It's absolutely insane to be demonising Intel over this in the full context of the tech world and the complex design of high-performance processors. ARM TrustZone has a few critical, unfixable security bugs too, meaning Zen has some. Keep things in perspective. This is incredibly complex, difficult work. That a mistake would be made is inevitable. That it happened to Intel is purely a manifestation of chance.

[jagdtigger]

9 minutes ago, Bit_Guardian said:

Please read what you quoted in its full context...

 

NO ONE REMOTELY BELIEVED OR HAD REASON TO BELIEVE IT WAS BROKEN

 

is the bottom line. Intel has had the highest performing branch predictor in the world for at least 5 years. No one even began looking at exploiting speculative execution until 3 years ago.

 

No tech company has had a perfect run, none. It's absolutely insane to be demonising Intel over this in the full context of the tech world and the complex design of high-performance processors. ARM TrustZone has a few critical, unfixable security bugs too, meaning Zen has some. Keep things in perspective. This is incredibly complex, difficult work. That a mistake would be made is inevitable. That it happened to Intel is purely a manifestation of chance.

So someone finds a serious flaw but no-one believes it that the system is broken until a big fish says it... Top it off with the fact that intel released their refresh's knowing full well that it has serious issues. Sorry but that is a blatant lie, intel just wanted to rug it under the carpet...

There is no need to demonize them, they already done it themselves.

[mr moose]

8 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

So someone finds postulates a serious flaw but no-one believes it that the system is broken until a big fish says proves it..

 

Fixed that for you,  yes that is true now. 

 

EDIT: Also do you really think Intel tried to sweep this under the carpet when they knew full well that nearly every other major tech player was going to release the information after the patches were ready?    That's some next level straw grabbing. 

[Bit_Guardian]

8 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

So someone finds a serious flaw but no-one believes it that the system is broken until a big fish says it... Top it off with the fact that intel released their refresh's knowing full well that it has serious issues. Sorry but that is a blatant lie, intel just wanted to rug it under the carpet...

There is no need to demonize them, they already done it themselves.

It's not that no one believes it. It's that resources are always limited, and they assumed the model was safe enough at least to not be a priority vs. other things (such as the APIC, the JTAG, the Management Engine, and others). Shit happens. There is not a single CPU manufacturer who has avoided getting a serious zero-day exploit requiring software patching, not one.

 

There is no logical reason to demonize Intel over this. They've been assisting with patching the various kernels since June, doing their due diligence. I don't even remotely mind the Coffee Lake launch. It was the same product as Kaby Lake just with pricing reset. They'll win their lawsuit on that alone.

[DildorTheDecent]

On 04/01/2018 at 7:52 PM, Primefoxer said:

Linus Torvalds, dislikes Nvidia and now Intel, he is the one that AMD 'fanboys' will worship. That is until he also voices his dislike on them too.

Nobody can ever be annoyed at the Lord and Saviour of PC Gaming that is AMD surely...