Hyper-Threading, Linus Torvalds vs. Colin Percival

OutsideIn writes "The recent Hyper-Threading vulnerability announcement has generated a fair amount of discussion since it was released. KernelTrap has an interesting article quoting Linux creator Linus Torvalds who recently compared the vulnerability to similar issues with early SMP and direct-mapped caches suggesting, "it doesn't seem all that worrying in real life." Colin Percival, who published a recent paper on the vulnerability, strongly disagreed with Linus' assessment saying, "it is at times like this that Linux really suffers from having a single dictator in charge; when Linus doesn't understand a problem, he won't fix it, even if all the cryptographers in the world are standing against him.""

Comments

Re:He won't fix it?

[dindi]

an even if he does not accept the patch,

it can sit online somewhere and if someone with a HT machine needs it -> it is available ....

i don't thenk anyone would refuse a patch that poses a security risk .... if the risk is soooooo smaaaaalll then no fix is needed, but it is appreciated ....