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Linus Torvalds goes off on Intel about Spectre patches

I can't copy and quote the whole thing because there is some of his trademark Gordon Ramsay-esque language (for good reason), but here's a great excerpt. Wonder if Lisa Su and the AMD execs are laughing their ßutt off after reading it since they're staying clear of this?

https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/1/21/192

Have you _looked_ at the patches you are talking about? You should

have - several of them bear your name.

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.

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.

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.

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Yah, sure makes your inner conspiracy theorist go off!

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Not really so much conspiracy theorist as knee-jerk. Spectre and Meltdown hit the news so hard  they had to do SOMETHING, even if it were garbage. Realistically there are many more programs which have much more of a security risk, especially to the good 70% of PC users who know as much about them as I do about quantum physics, but are treated as "normal", such as Java and Flash. Heck, you ask me what the biggest security risk is these days it's the advertisers who run automated ad networks and take money from anyone without checking what they're doing, which leads to even legitimate sites being affected by drive by downloads, cryptoviruses, and ransomware. A close second would be legitimate programs who take money from other companies to bundle their software in the installer which installs by default (Ask toolbar anyone?).

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Amen, I told Kim Komando that I unsubscribe from her emails 2 years ago because they constantly linked to malware!

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