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Intel Urges OEMs and End Users To Stop Deploying Spectre Patch As It May 'Introduce Higher Than Expected Reboots' (intel.com)
Intel executive vice president Neil Shenoy said on Monday that the chip-maker has identified the source of some of the recent problems, so it is now recommended that users skip the available patches. From the blog post: We recommend that OEMs, cloud service providers, system manufacturers, software vendors and end users stop deployment of current versions, as they may introduce higher than expected reboots and other unpredictable system behavior.
You mean like, more than zero? Apart from a planned a kernel upgrade I never reboot. My systems also don’t reboot spontaneously.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
They thought they spent enough money astro-turfing that they wouldn't need to spend any more developing a patch. When the astro-turfing campaign failed, they had to scramble to produce something that nobody would use but that everyone would believe was "best effort."
"We recommend everyone stop deployment of Intel CPUs". Higher than expected reboots? More than 1 to install the update? The root cause is design flaws and inadequate testing of major low level patches. Google new about these issues months ago and Intel did (or should have) too. They rushed the release so the stock price does not tank not because it was ready. They normally take many months or years to test these design changes or updates and now it will be a long time before they have new CPUs that don't need fixes (or at least these fixes). May be they should have worked around the clock months ago when they did not need to be rushed.
The only way to truly fix things is to replace the CPU. And that would really hurt/destroy Intel's bottom line.
;)
Which leaves them flailing about wildly for some other appearance of a solution/solution to, at the very least cover their butts, mean while costing them a little as possible.
Just my 2 cents
It means "we will continue to fuck you with shoddy products". Linus is right on the mark for this one.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
In other words their patch crashes your machine.
This reminds me of the various colorful circumlocutions people around the world use for death. In France someone who dies "eats daisies by the roots". In Germany he "gives up his spoon". In China he "goes to sell salted duck eggs."
I suppose in Intel-speak death would be "non-transitory pulmonary quiescence."
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The fact that they took half a year to deliver this cluster**** could be an indicator that no true "fix" is possible or that the performance losses of a true fix would have a far worse overall impact than just accepting random reboots.
I understand that they'd likely need a multi-government bailout and years of production time to replace all of the broken processors, but facing reality and moving forward with a real fix feels like the healthiest thing for the system as a whole. How much time and money is being wasted worldwide by IT folks and software engineers on this fiasco?
You're assuming they spent half a year working on a fix. I think it's far more likely that:
2 months were wasted by engineers trying to convince management that the problem really was potentially very serious
2 months waiting for management to try to figure out who to blame and how to make sure it wouldn't reflect negatively on them or impact their departmental budget or personal performance bonuses
1.5 months for PR to come up with the best possible language to make sure they could paint the entire industry as being equally affected, while simultaneously the lawyers tried to find the largest possible scraps of TP to cover their corporate *sses
.5 months working on a fix
An imperfect plan executed violently is far superior to a perfect plan. -- George Patton