87 lines
3.4 KiB
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87 lines
3.4 KiB
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<title> News Bytes #24 </title>
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<P> <HR> <P>
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Subject: <B>Re: F00F bug *fixed* in 2.0.x kernels</B> <BR>
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From: Linus Torvalds, torvalds@transmeta.com <BR>
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Date: 1997/11/15
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<P>
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Toon Moene <<A
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HREF="mailto:toon@moene.indiv.nluug.nl">toon@moene.indiv.nluug.nl</A>>
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wrote: <BR>
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><A
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HREF="mailto:set-usenet-879492588@reality.samiam.org">set-usenet-879492588@reality.samiam.org</A>
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(Sam Trenholme) wrote: <BR>
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>
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>> The <B>Linux</B> developers have, again, done the impossible.
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Within seven days <BR>
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>> of the serious FOOF <B>bug</B> in the Pentium being discovered,
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the kernel <BR>
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>> developers have not only figured out a software fix for the
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problem, but <BR>
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>> have patches for *both* the 2.1.63 and the 2.0.31 kernels which
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make <BR>
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>> <B>Linux</B> <B>immune</B> to the <B>F00F</B> <B>bug</B>. <BR>
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> <BR>
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>And the most interesting aspect of it is, of course, that Intel tried
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the <BR>
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>good old road of keeping the Free Software Community out of it by only
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<BR>
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>supplying a fix to BSDI.<BR>
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> <BR>
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>Long Live Reverse Engineering ! <BR>
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<P>
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To be fair to Intel, I want to tell people that Intel (a) did approach
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me too, and that (b) the BSDi patch was in fact unauthorized by intel
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and had to be withdrawn by BSDi.
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<P>
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So intel actually did pretty much do the correct thing this time. Sure,
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they pissed me off a lot when I heard that BSDi had gotten the patch,
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but when it became clear that they hadn't _meant_ it that way, their
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approach was actually totally understandable.
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<P>
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Essentially, they asked everybody to sign NDA's in order to let
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_everybody_ in on the fix to the problem, and not have anybody be the
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"first" one.
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<P>
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Now, I personally think that asking people to sign NDA's for a <B>bug</B> that
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they themselves had introduced is pretty stupid, which was the reason I
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refused when they contacted me. In this case, that turned out to be the
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right solution, because then when BSDi did make the patch available
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despite the NDA my hands weren't tied in any way.
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<P>
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Note that we would probably have figured out the fix even without BSDi,
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although it might have taken a day or two more. Ingo Molnar had already
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found another way to make the problem go away (with a very bad
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performance impact, admittedly), but there were people working on
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approaches that would probably eventually have ended up with what we
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have now anyway.
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<P>
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As to today, intel seems to be quite open about the problem, and they
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have even given me their own patch for fixing this in 2.0.x (which does
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essentially the same thing that we already did, but with a few
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improvements actually).
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<P>
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ftp.kernel.org has my latest 2.0.32 pre-patch in the directory
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"pub/<B>linux</B>/kernel/testing", and I'm just about to do another 2.1.x
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release with most of the obvious problems fixed.
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<P>
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<center>Linus</center>
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