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Intel's Reworked Microcode Security Fix License No Longer Prohibits Benchmarking (theregister.co.uk)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Intel has backtracked on the license for its latest microcode update that mitigates security vulnerabilities in its processors -- after the previous wording outlawed public benchmarking of the chips. The reason for Intel's insistence on a vow of silence is that -- even with the new microcode in place -- turning off hyper-threading is necessary to protect virtual machines from attack via Foreshadow -- and that move comes with a potential performance hit. Predictably, Intel's contractual omerta had the opposite effect and drew attention to the problem. "Performance is so bad on the latest Spectre patch that Intel had to prohibit publishing benchmarks," said Lucas Holt, MidnightBSD project lead, via Twitter.
In response to the outcry, Intel subsequently said it would rewrite the licensing terms. And now the fix is in. Via Twitter, Imad Sousou, corporate VP and general manager of Intel Open Source Technology Center, on Thursday said: "We have simplified the Intel license to make it easier to distribute CPU microcode updates and posted the new version here. As an active member of the open source community, we continue to welcome all feedback and thank the community." The reworked license no longer prohibits benchmarking. Long-time Slashdot reader and open-source pioneer, Bruce Perens, first brought Intel's microcode update to our attention. In a phone interview with The Register, Perens said he approved of the change. "This is a relatively innocuous license for proprietary software and it can be distributed in the non-free section of Debian, which is where is used to be, and it should be distributable by other Linux distributions," he said. "You can't expect every lawyer to understand CPUs. Sometimes they have to have a deep conversation with their technical people."
In response to the outcry, Intel subsequently said it would rewrite the licensing terms. And now the fix is in. Via Twitter, Imad Sousou, corporate VP and general manager of Intel Open Source Technology Center, on Thursday said: "We have simplified the Intel license to make it easier to distribute CPU microcode updates and posted the new version here. As an active member of the open source community, we continue to welcome all feedback and thank the community." The reworked license no longer prohibits benchmarking. Long-time Slashdot reader and open-source pioneer, Bruce Perens, first brought Intel's microcode update to our attention. In a phone interview with The Register, Perens said he approved of the change. "This is a relatively innocuous license for proprietary software and it can be distributed in the non-free section of Debian, which is where is used to be, and it should be distributable by other Linux distributions," he said. "You can't expect every lawyer to understand CPUs. Sometimes they have to have a deep conversation with their technical people."
The power of the media.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Slashdot may be a bully pulpit, but Bruce Perens desrves the credit.
If there's one silver lining to this shitstorm it's that AMD should continue to get more and more sales.
I know my next upgrade is going to be a ryzen because of spectre/meltdown and also to spite intel for basically preventing >4 cores becoming mainstream. If they'd have worked on jamming more cores into affordable cpus maybe we'd be seeing far more heavily multithreaded games & programs.
No faster than AMD's offerings, but at a 50% higher price. And they've been doing this for over a decade, knowingly putting out flawed CPUs just to beat the performance charts.
You like that Intel Inside bragging right? Open up your wallet then, the lying cheating fuckers at Intel would like to take as much as you're willing to give.
Only buy AMD.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
This was utterly stupid of them. They had to know that this would only draw more attention to the fact and they had to know that they couldn't prohibit benchmarking. That simply wasn't going to happen. And now that they've had to retract this idiotic policy, they've practically ensured that every tech site is going to do loads of benchmarking when they might not have otherwise been interested (there were a few when Meltdown and Spectre first came out, but I haven't seen a lot of benchmarks for the newer varients), but because Intel turned this into a big story, now everyone is going to want to do benchmarks to ride the renewed wave of interest.
This was like getting pulled over by a cop and shouting, "Nothing suspicious in the trunk!" before the cop has even had a chance to ask for your license and registration.
My chip will now become something I did not pay for.
To put it into a car analogy: it’s like when you buy a car that does 1000 miles before refueling only to find out they cheated emissions and after updates now only gets 700 miles.
I bought my chip for HT. Even my mobo is useless now, because I want a full refund and I will be switching to AMD.
See you in Australian court INTEL.
On a binary blob, closed source, forbidden to decompile, study or whatever they wrote this: "As an active member of the open source community"?
Shame on them!
Intel, I have no idea what bozo is responsible for this, but please do yourself and the world a favor and fire him. Out of a cannon. What this idiot managed to do with the "must not benchmark" bullshit was that everyone wants the benchmark results.
This stupidity now makes sure that everyone can get them legally, too.
Unless this microcode patch actually causes no performance hit, which would make it a great PR stunt, but is very unlikely considering what we've seen so far, this is about the worst kind of PR disaster you could possibly have gotten into.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
When a company does not want people looking into its products and talking about its products?
Its time to find a new company with better products they allow full and open discussion of.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
So what are we up to in speed reduction? I guess for most around 10 to 20 % if everything is enabled.
Average speed reduction is uninteresting. What matters is how much the bottlenecks that hurts you the most, now or in the future, are going to be affected. To know that, you need to look at the worst case numbers, not "most".
Because this is slashdot, the obligatory car analogy is that if a car manufacturer installed a top speed limiter of 75 mph as a firmware update, and then said it would not affect most users much, given that the average speed is 35 mph.
> "You can't expect every lawyer to understand CPUs.
Well, I would think it is sort of a prerequisite for lawyers representing a fucking CPU manufacturing company to understand the licensing issues surrounding cpu microcode.
So, I'm not buying it. They knew the implications. Intel just wasn't expecting pushback on the licensing of their already nonfree proprietary software.
Because this is slashdot, the obligatory car analogy is that if a car manufacturer installed a top speed limiter of 75 mph as a firmware update, and then said it would not affect most users much, given that the average speed is 35 mph.
2008 called -- they want their Slashdot back.
No, really. We want it back!
(Imagine a Beowulf cluster of "I for one..." car analogies! I would like that. Rather than the rampant technological ignorance most of the comments illustrate these days. Present commentary excluded naturally.)
Not kidding!
Where did you get "dumb fucking lawyer" part? Nothing in Intel's response indicates there was any error: "we have simplified the Intel license to make it easier to distribute CPU microcode updates".
They corrected it after it become news and topic of embarrassing public discussion. What other choice did they have?
They are lawyers - sometimes they need a kick in the crotch.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII