The inventor of Linux criticize Intel chip design

by do son · January 7, 2018

According to foreign media reports, Linus Torvalds, inventor of the Linux OS, said something about chip loopholes that have been making a lot of noise in the near future. He said Intel really needs to take a good look at their CPUs. In its view, rather than spend effort on PR writing, admit that their chips are flawed.

Intel partners are quietly taking corrective action, but also specifically mentioned the existence of another AMD chip and ARM architecture loopholes – Spectre. Indeed, criticism has always been milder in the tech industry, but it does not work with Torvalds:

From Linus Torvalds <>
Date Wed, 3 Jan 2018 15:51:35 -0800
Subject Re: Avoid speculative indirect calls in kernel

On Wed, Jan 3, 2018 at 3:09 PM, Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org> wrote:
> This is a fix for Variant 2 in
> https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2018/01/reading-privileged-memory-with-side.html
>
> Any speculative indirect calls in the kernel can be tricked
> to execute any kernel code, which may allow side channel
> attacks that can leak arbitrary kernel data.

Why is this all done without any configuration options?

A *competent* CPU engineer would fix this by making sure speculation
doesn’t happen across protection domains. Maybe even a L1 I$ that is
keyed by CPL.

I think somebody inside of Intel needs to really take a long hard look
at their CPU’s, and actually admit that they have issues instead of
writing PR blurbs that say that everything works as designed.

.. and that really means that all these mitigation patches should be
written with “not all CPU’s are crap” in mind.

Or is Intel basically saying “we are committed to selling you shit
forever and ever, and never fixing anything”?

Because if that’s the case, maybe we should start looking towards the
ARM64 people more.

Please talk to management. Because I really see exactly two possibibilities:

– Intel never intends to fix anything

OR

– these workarounds should have a way to disable them.

Which of the two is it?

Linus

Up to now, several technology giants, including Microsoft, Google, and Apple, have already taken remedial measures to the loopholes discovered. ARM gives developers and developers some helpful advice.

Intel is now accepting security surveys from investors, and at the same time, it will have to face a bunch of litigation.

Reference: businessinsider