Linus Torvalds Comments On STIBP & He's Not Happy - STIBP Default Will End Up Changing

[birdie]

Birdie just has linked one message – that hasn't got any replies – written to LKML by him. I don't think that's enough evidence to claim that he "made Linus notice the issue".

I wrote to Linus directly as well but there's no URL for that.

[0Yg7pQpFGiwcw]

Irrespective of your biases, you did good here. We all thank you. Now we're gonna get sane behavior out of this.

Also Thanks needs to go to Michael as well, I mean he develops PTS, and it was his time and equipment and tools that highlighted this. I legitimately feel like Michael deserves to get paid for this. His tools and collection of equipment for highlighting performance regressions is amazing.

Birdie just has linked one message – that hasn't got any replies – written to LKML by him. I don't think that's enough evidence to claim that he "made Linus notice the issue".

[schmidtbag]

Some package managers will do this, others are painless. I prefer pacman, which just appends '.pacnew' to the new file's name (along with a note to stdout). It really annoys me when I come back to an aptitude machine and instead of being finished it's only just started and then stopped at a silly prompt.

I like both systems for different reasons. The Arch method is convenient for the reason you just mentioned - it's non-intrusive. On the other hand, I have been screwed over on multiple occasions because of a change Arch did that I wasn't aware of, whereas apt explicitly gives you a choice.

What I would personally prefer is something that does a little bit of both - get the bulk of the packages installed, but at the very end of the installation process, ask about config files that may need to be replaced or revised.

[timrichardson]

Nah, he has been indoctrinated by PC people during the forced "vacation". We've lost boys.

May have lost the boys, but haven't lost the men.

[L_A_G]

If you don't get microcode updates, you won't have these instructions?

The instructions have been there from the factory, but with microcode updates the issues can and have been mitigated.

[tenplus1]

Michael and it's me, sir, who made Linus notice the issue. I'm just saying. Despite tons of hatred that I receive here. Luckily I don't care.

It's kinda sad that when I'm saying something here people disregard me, but if it's Linus then, "Oh, God, he's so right".

Ya did the right thing, I'd rather have an opt-in approach and have my system running faster than a huge performance hit.

[brrrrttttt]

I think you are really over-complicating this. Are you telling me you've never been prompted for a question when updating or installing software, regardless of platform?

Some package managers will do this, others are painless. I prefer pacman, which just appends '.pacnew' to the new file's name (along with a note to stdout). It really annoys me when I come back to an aptitude machine and instead of being finished it's only just started and then stopped at a silly prompt.

[audir8]

I do hope the full mitigation kernel flags for Spectre v2, v4, and L1TF are all combined into one flag called yolo2018.

[F.Ultra]

I think you are really over-complicating this. Are you telling me you've never been prompted for a question when updating or installing software, regardless of platform?

Oh I have, never once though but every single time I performed an update of said software. I've also developed tons of software that does this and thus have experience on all the various things that can go wrong with something that on the surface looks very simple but in reality isn't quite so uncomplicated if you want to handle every corner case and make every user as happy as possible.

[schmidtbag]

Then we have to decide when "once" will happen. When you install a kernel with such support for the first time would of course be the natural answer, but then how will the system know when that is the case, perhaps you jumped over one kernel version or compile you own kernels and so on.

I think you are really over-complicating this. Are you telling me you've never been prompted for a question when updating or installing software, regardless of platform?

So next who ever asks this question must now have root access to /etc/default/grub/ (distribution specific path) and set some flag that indicates that it already asked the question (it cannot just scan the boot flags since the non-existence of the flag could be both that you answered "yes enable" or that you haven't answered it yet).

Uh... you also need root access to do the vast majority of work during an update or install process and it's pretty common practice for various distributions to make tweaks to your grub.cfg, so I'm not sure what you're getting at here.

But "whah, whah I don't want to have to use that hard to use terminal" well then perhaps you also might be precise the kind of user that really needs to have this feature enabled by default.

I agree.