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Linus Torvalds Growing Frustrated by Buggy Hardware and Theoretical CPU Attacks

10 points by pabs3 7 hours ago | 3 comments

cedws 4 hours ago

Agree with Linus, why is it kernel developers’ problem to clean up the fallout of CPU manufacturers mistakes? We just need to accept past assumptions about process isolation are over. Do sensitive computation on a dedicated, separate CPU.

GianFabien 3 hours ago

When I study the architecture of newly released processors, I'm overwhelmed by the complexity. Branch prediction, pipelining, superscalar, etc, etc. I consider modern CPUs to be excessively complicated due to programming languages still mostly being single imperative execution stream oriented.

foldr 55 minutes ago

It's difficult to see how this will change, though. We've had the dream of automatic parallelization by Sufficiently Smart Compilers (which turned out to be insufficiently smart) and the dream of automatic parallization of pure functional code (which turns out not to yield reliable performance gains in practice). No-one wants to write explicitly parallel code if they can possibly avoid it, so it falls to CPUs to desequentialise the code.