Linus Torvalds explains why he's "fed up with" Intel, AMD, Nvidia and their "buggy hardware"

Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux, is a fairly expressive person and his takes are almost always very interesting.

In a recent message on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) public inbox, Torvalds has been spotted showing his frustration about processor vulnerabilities as he said that he was "pretty damn fed up with buggy hardware and completely theoretical attacks" as he feels it is the job of the hardware vendors, the likes of Intel, AMD or Nvidia, to do better in finding theoretical attacks and vulnerabilities due to certain unaddressed and underlying hardware issues.

He wrote:

Honestly, I'm pretty damn fed up with buggy hardware and completely theoretical attacks that have never actually shown themselves to be used in practice.

So I think this time we push back on the hardware people and tell them it's *THEIR* damn problem, and if they can't even be bothered to say yay-or-nay, we just sit tight.

Because dammit, let's put the onus on where the blame lies, and not just take any random shit from bad hardware and say "oh, but it *might* be a problem".

Linus

If you are wondering, Intel's Kirill Shutemov, a senior Linux software engineer, provides additional context on what the issue is about:

LAM brings own speculation issues that is going to be addressed by LASS. There was a patch to disable LAM until LASS is landed, but it never got applied for some reason.

Intel introduced LAM or Liner Address Masking with its 12th Gen Sapphire Rapids chips to improve memory safety by masking the metadata-containing memory pointer address. AMD's Upper Address Ignore (UAI) also works in a similar fashion and was introduced with the Zen 4 architecture or Ryzen 7000 series.

However, utilizing LAM makes a CPU vulnerable to speculation attacks also called SLAM (short for side-channel attacks via LAM) and Shutemov says it can be mitigated with the help of LASS or Linear Address Space Separation that provides hardware-based address-space isolation. (AMD just released a new Windows chipset driver to protect against similar attacks.)

This is not the first time Linus Torvalds has complained against hardware companies over vulnerabilities. Back in 2023, the faulTPM CPU flaw on AMD Ryzen chips irked him so much that he labelled it as the "stupid fTPM hwrnd thing" and simply wanted to disable it and be done with.

Source: LKML (link1, link2)