XPost: comp.os.linux.advocacy
From: bonkyboo@canithesis.org

Farley Flud wrote:
> On 13 Dec 2025 12:43:06 GMT, Stéphane CARPENTIER wrote:
>
>>
>> No. Dr. Moore was right, and nothing can make him wrong. He predicted
>> stuff only for 10 years. And he was right. Others took his name to a
>> give it to a law. But if the law at his name can stop to be right at
>> some time, it won't make him wrong.
>>
>
> Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!
>
> Idiot.  Moore's Law is long dead and buried.
>
> But the brilliant engineers at Intel have kept the progress alive
> with the concepts of instruction pipelining and branch prediction.
>
> These are fantastic ideas.  They are so good that they have destroyed
> the measure of an instruction cycle.  It used to be possible to explicitly
> state that instruction X required Y clock cycles and to even time
> an entire instruction chain.  But not any more.
>
> However, some bad actors have learned to exploit such processor
> magic for nefarious ends.  Ever hear of "Spectre?"
>
> But such nefarious exploits apply only to public facing servers
> and are totally irrelevant on standalone desktop workstations.
>
> That does not stop the mainstream distros from crippling their
> kernels with useless mitigations.
>
> Brother, if you are not using Gentoo then please, please, run
> to the nearest psycho ward.
>
> We do thank you.
>

I would rather have worse cache efficiency by default than have the
majority of computers in the world be vulnerable to privilege bypass
exploits capable of throwing literally all security out the window in
the presence of unaudited software, even sandboxed software
(automatically loaded javascript). Most people will not notice or care
about the minor performance degradation except maybe gamers and data
scientists, and those people are upgrading to the newest hardware anyway
with less vulnerabilities.

Don't underestimate the inability for system administrators at risk to
set up good security defaults. And don't think your data isn't valuable.

Yes, as the typical end user your threat model will look nothing like a
large company holding confidential customer data, but that does not mean
crippling an attack surface by making it unlikely to work is not a net
positive for everyone.

If you REALLY don't care, turn those mitigations off, and then thank
everyone else who, knowingly or not, keeps them turned on for making the
internet usable with yours disabled.

You've got that last part backwards. Gentoo users belong in psych wards. :)

--
*bonkmaykr*
Director, Programming Lead


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