Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.