Stefan Mileschin

We went for a rant which never happened

Linus Torvalds surprised observers at the Open Source Summit by not wading into Chipzilla’s handling of the Spectre fiasco.

IT's Mr Sweary was expected to share a few colourful words on Intel’s handling of the bug, which hacked off a large number in the Open Saucy world.

But Torvalds was surprisingly philosophical about the bug, which was based on Intel’s use of speculative execution.

“I still love speculative execution. I think a CPU must do speculative execution”, he said.

“It's somewhat sad that then people didn't always think about or didn't always heed the warnings about what can go wrong when you take a few shortcuts in the name of making it slightly simpler for everybody”, Torvald’s added.

He said that every single security problem has been speculative execution, where people knew that "Hey, this is speculative work. If something goes wrong we'll throw all the data away, so we don't need to be as careful as we would otherwise."

He said that the Spectre bug was a good lesson for the industry, but it was certainly not a fun lesson for OS writers.

“We had to do a lot of extra work for problems that weren't our problems. It feels somehow unfair. I mean, when we have a security bug that was our own fault, it's like, "Okay, it was us screwing up. It's fair that we have to do all the work to then fix our own bugs."

Linus said that the Spectre bug was good news in many ways.

"The bugs have become clearly more and more esoteric. So it impacts fewer and fewer cases, and clearly hardware people at Intel and other places are now so aware of it that I'm hoping we're really getting to the dregs of the hardware security bugs”, Linus said.

https://fudzilla.com/news/47151-linu...l-over-spectre