Wednesday, September 4, 2019

Linux Hardware Issue Mitigations in 2019

Everybody remembers Spectre and Meltdown.  Not as many folks have followed along as Spectre and Meltdown gathered their evil buddies.  You know who has followed along, though?  The Linux community.  They have systematically and professionally mitigated every one of these issues for over two years, deploying mitigations to literally millions of Linux systems across the world.  The community has done this outside of the comfort of their normal process, making special accommodations for the hardware vendors who need their help.

Each of these issues have added mountains of challenging work that has to be done under constraints like secrecy and short timelines.  The mountains of work are a day by day, hour by hour slog of developing, reviewing and backporting that continues to this day.  This work helps Intel sell CPUs, which helps Intel pay my salary, which puts a roof over my head and lets me buy the occasional beer.

To all of my colleagues in the Linux community: Thank you!  I don't say it enough, but I sincerely appreciate all the help you've given me personally and all the help you've given Intel and its customers.

I work for Intel, but all opinions are my own.