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Intel's Reworked Microcode Security Fix License No Longer Prohibits Benchmarking (theregister.co.uk)

Posted by BeauHD on from the mission-accomplished dept.

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."

6 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. Thanks, Bruce by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Slashdot may be a bully pulpit, but Bruce Perens desrves the credit.

    1. Re:Thanks, Bruce by Tough+Love · · Score: 5, Informative

      Slashdot may be a bully pulpit...

      More accurately, TheReg was the bully pulpit, Slashdot was an amplifier.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    2. Re:Thanks, Bruce by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 4, Informative

      Thank you! Obviously Debian and friends were after Intel before I saw that other Linux distributions had accepted the license and decided that the people needed some education on the topic. I can't say for sure that Intel wasn't already working on the improved license before I got involved.

      This is still a proprietary software license, and it's unfortunate that if you want the security fixes you have to load a binary blob on your nice otherwise-100%-Free-Software system every time you boot it up.

      If you'd like to help me do stuff like this, there's my brand-new Patreon site, follow me on Twitter and re-tweet me when I'm working on things like this, keep watching Perens.com and my submissions to Slashdot (which are often rejected).

      --
      Bruce Perens.
  2. Bad for intel, good for AMD at least by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. Accomplishing just the opposite by alvinrod · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Seriously? by franzrogar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!