Torvalds declares patches "complete garbage" - Intel says Don't Deploy Faulty Patches

[catweazel]

Three interesting articles on the recent patch-frenzy:

Intel: Don't Deploy Our Faulty Spectre Patches

The company is now advising users to stop deploying the current versions of its patches, as they 'may introduce higher than expected reboots and other unpredictable system behavior.'

Stop installing our buggy Spectre CPU firmware fixes, Intel says

“We have now identified the root cause for Broadwell and Haswell platforms, and made good progress in developing a solution to address it,” Intel executive vice president Navin Shenoy said in a January 22 post. “We recommend that OEMs, cloud service providers, system manufacturers, software vendors and end users stop deployment of current versions, as they may introduce higher than expected reboots and other unpredictable system behavior.”

Torvalds declares patches "complete garbage"

"They do literally insane things. They do things that do not make sense," he said of the patches in a post on the Linux kernel mailing list.

"And I really don't want to see these garbage patches just mindlessly sent around."

[Faust]

@catweazel
In fairness to all readers , I feel your post should have an alert at the top :-

WARNING - this post contains common sense !

Intel have the worst case of " Headless Chicken Syndrome " on the planet right now , but then they have SO much to lose .

Some folks must have an awful lot of spare time on their hands to risk borking a perfectly good ,
stable and safe system for no valid reason ....
.... and there is still no bogey-man under the bed !

[catweazel]

Some folks must have an awful lot of spare time on their hands to risk borking a perfectly good ,
stable and safe system for no valid reason ....
.... and there is still no bogey-man under the bed !

I fully agree.

[Lysander666]

The only thing I've done is install the official updates to the Debian and Slackare kernels. I don't see the sense in patch after patch. A lot of people are updating all they can. I don't think it does that much good in the long run.

[Sir Charles]

Intel have the worst case of " Headless Chicken Syndrome " on the planet right now , but then they have SO much to lose .

In economic terms, Intel doesn't seem to be hit that hard, not yet anyway. The value of their share has decreased by only ca. 1.25 % in
the past month, the "heyday" of Meltdown/Spectre:

Screenshot_2018-01-25_13-01-59.png

For the past three months there is even a rise by 1.11 %:

Screenshot_2018-01-25_13-04-02.png

(source: https://www.google.se/search?q=intel+st ... e&ie=UTF-8)

So what the future holds for Intel, in economic terms, remains still to be seen. I for one, I will not be buying any "Intel Inside" machine anytime soon despite an actual need for replacing my computer. But then there are billions of us.

[Hoser Rob]

Some folks must have an awful lot of spare time on their hands to risk borking a perfectly good ,
stable and safe system for no valid reason ....
.... and there is still no bogey-man under the bed !

I fully agree.

Me too.