Linus Torvalds Latest Meltdown: “Is Intel Selling Sh*t And Never Willing To Fix Anything?”

It’s not surprising to hear that the creator of the open-source Linux kernel couldn’t hold his temper after learning that Intel processors are affected by vulnerabilities that date back more than a decade ago. And why not? He has enough power to criticize Intel as the active development of the 26-year-old Linux kernel can’t go forward without him.

What could have escalated his anger is the fact that any fixes applied to mitigate the Intel Meltdown bug and the related Spectre would result in the slowdown of the affected machines. And that won’t be good for servers and personal devices running Linux-based distributions. According to a ZDNet report, fixing the Intel Meltdown bug requires a major redesign in the Linux kernel.

Must Read: How To Protect Your PC And Phones From Meltdown And Spectre CPU Flaws?

“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,” wrote Torvalds in a mail sent to a Linux list.

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

Torvalds even suggests shifting over to ARM as an alternative for Linux if Intel remains careless at fixing bugs in their products.

As far as Intel is concerned, they’ve started rolling security updates and promised to fix almost 90% of Intel-powered devices released in the last five years by next week. For them, it’s the second major setback the ME chip exploit reported last year.

Source: LKML

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