Intel Clears Up Microcode Licensing Controversy - Simpler License, Allows Benchmarking

[howarth]

The rumor seems to be that this is related to the latest microcode changes disabling hyper threading to protect against the Foreshadow exploit.

[sandy8925]

Ugh, lawyers. You always need to keep the legal team on a tight leash.

[r1348]

I have the feeling that's a licence they apply to unreleased/preview software they send to partners for testing, and that somehow leaked into a mainstream release.
Otherwise it would be literal PR foot-shooting.

[fuzz]

Shouldn't be legal to write stuff like this

It's just as legal to keep you from knowing how pacemaker software works, even if your life depends on it .

[Xicronic]

This license ... just doesn't allow reverse-engineering/disassembly.

Shouldn't be legal to write stuff like this

[Candy]

Intel is going to die a horrible death, once everything is moved on with ARM (no matter for their license to fuck around with ARM cpus)

[ruthan]

They just tried it, it could pass.. as other nasty things and after that it would be too late..

[pete910]

How on earth was they going to stop that exactly ?

[wswartzendruber]

Now is not the time for Intel to be arrogant.

[perpetually high]

Thanks Michael. I thought you handled the situation well for what it's worth.

It's no secret that I've been picky about my microcode's these days (using 22 instead of 25 on my Haswell). 22 was pre-Spectre/Meltdown, and since I disable all the mitigations in my boot parameters, I don't see any reason to slow down my machine.

I use Strict Site Isolation in my browsers, and I think that's good enough for me. Obviously for the wider industry, cloud providers, and the majority of others, this isn't a viable option, so yeah, I can understand why we're all pissed off. I'm just saying I turned that shit off and my system is flying.