Linus Torvalds Growing Frustrated By Buggy Hardware & Theoretical CPU Attacks

So he is like the rest of us

Who would've thought

He's not the only one. Laptops especially seem to crash regularily nowadays, regardless the OS.

I'd like to see hardware classified by boringness and thus stability.

That’s not what this is about. He’s complaining about hardware developers putting more work on kernel developers by making them patch all the CPU vulnerabilities that are introduced by trying to increase performance.
I've definitely moved back to desktops. Still have my laptops but I use them in limited cases.
Not the kinds of bugs he is talking about. This is about spectre mitigations.
Not trying to shill for Apple or anything, but I have found MacBooks (excluding the 2015 MacBook, and the 2016-2020 Air and Pro models) to be extremely stable and reliable, especially since they use their custom ARM CPU/SOCs. It reminds me of the good old PowerPC days, these machines were also reliable, basically unbreakable like a tank. In build quality, hardware and software. With the ARM transition, Apple really appears to have brought back the glory days of computing (unfortunately not in terms of upgradability and repairability, but at least in quality, stability and reliability).

I'm even more excited for the continiously improving Linux support on these devices - thanks to the amazing Asahi Linux (!asahilinux@lemmy.world) project. Also consider following them on Mastodon: @AsahiLinux@treehouse.systems
- I will say I've never ever even once had an issue with my M1 pro 16", can't say that about any other laptop I've owned (be it battery swelling, software bugs, or "issues" one learns to live with like sleep mode causing boot crashes or sleep mode draining battery %). Kinda amazing in hindsight.
I've never had my laptop crash unless I was playing STALKER, GAMMA. What makes your laptop crash? I'm not doubting you, I'm just curious.
- Waking up from sleep mode mostly.
I recently got a Minisforum V3 and put arch on it.

Not only has it never crashed so far, but sleep and waking up worked out of the box, which was a huge surprise to me.

Hardware people sounds like a euphemism for protogen.

- eww put an nsfw tag on that

Could someone please explain to a non-tech expert?

In the last 10 years there has been a seemingly noteworthy uptick in hardware bugs in both intel and amd CPUs. Security researchers find and figure out potential attack vectors that rely on these bugs (ex. Specter/Meltdown). Then operating systems have to put workarounds in their kernel code to ensure that these hypothetical attack vectors are accounted for, at the cost of performance and more complicated code.

Linus is saying how annoyed he is with all this extra work they have to do, resulting in worse performance, all to plug vulnerabilities that we've never actually seen any real attackers use. He's saying instead we should just write the code how it should be, and if the hardware is insecure, let it be the hardware company's problem when customers don't use the hardware.

The problem is, customers will continue to use the hardware and companies who need a secure OS (all of them) will opt to not use Linux if it doesn't plug these holes.
hardware is like your computer, stuff like the cpu and ram. software is like the programs on that computer. linus torvalds makes a program that has to deal with the details of the computer (the linux kernel). as such, they have to work around problems in the hardware.

Fully validating hardware is an insane task that hasn't been really done in years. It would mean 5 years between chip releases and a 2-5X in cost to produce, and people wouldn't follow the validated configs anyways. If we followed the validated hardware spec we would have 50 min boot times and not go past a 3.5Ghz clock.

People have the choice today on if they want to run on validated hardware. You can opt in to get a 2.8Ghz part that supports 2666MT/s that is mostly tested and validated, or you can get a 5Ghz part that supports 6000MT/s that is only partially validated. They cost the same price. What do folks think people pick?

Who said anything about fully validating hardware? "Hardware vendors should solve their own problems" is not the same as "hardware vendors should fully validate their products".
- Is this really the hardware vendor's problem though? It's the consumers problem.
  
  I bring up full validation because the concern here is putting in a speculative fix. If the ask is, why was the hardware like that in the first place the answer is because it can't be fully validated. If the ask is why should a speculative fix go into the Kernel it is because the consumers are not on top of tree and if a fix has a chance of never being exploited it needs to be pulled in years ahead so it goes into an LTR that customers migrate to BEFORE the issue comes up.