If the ask is, why was the hardware like that in the first place the answer is because it can’t be fully validated.

But that’s not the question. There are two questions: Who should be responsible for patching hardware vulnerabilities? And if the answer is “the kernel” then should speculative but never demonstrated vulnerabilities be patched? Linus’ answer is the hardware manufacturer, and no.

Is this really the hardware vendor’s problem though? It’s the consumers problem.

Maybe we’re running into the ambiguity of language. If you mean to say, “Who does it cause a problem for? The consumer.” then sure. On the other hand what I mean, and what I think Linus means, is “Who’s responsible for the vulnerability existing? Hardware vendors. Who should fix it? Hardware vendors.”

If the ask is why should a speculative fix go into the Kernel […]

Depends on what you/we/they mean by “speculative”. IMO, we need to do something (microcode, kernel patches, whatever) to patch Spectre and Meltdown. Those have been demonstrated to be real vulnerabilities, even if no one has exploited them yet. But “speculative” can mean something else. I’m not going to read all the LMK emails so maybe they’re talking about something else. But I’ve seen plenty of, “Well if X, Y, and Z happen then that could be a vulnerability.” For that kind of speculative vulnerability, one that has not been demonstrated to be a real vulnerability, I am sympathetic to Linus’ position.

Who said anything about fully validating hardware? “Hardware vendors should solve their own problems” is not the same as “hardware vendors should fully validate their products”.

Using git reset --keep would just make more work since I’ll have to throw away uncommitted changes anyways. Removing uncommitted changes is kind of the whole point, it is called ‘reset’ after all. If I want to preserve uncommitted changes, I’ll either stash them or commit them to a temporary branch. That has the added benefit of adding those changes to the reflog so if I screw up later I’ll be able to recover them.

If you’re using reset with uncommitted changes and you’re not intentionally throwing them away, you’re doing something wrong. git reset —hard means “fuck everything, set the state to X”. I only ever use it when I want to throw away the current state.

It’s not clear to me that AMD is in breach of contract, though I admit I haven’t looked into it in detail. But regardless, the contract is irrelevant to the open source thing unless that was in the terms of the contract.

If I steal code and release it with an open source license, that license is not valid. The author released his work open source based on an email from AMD. AMD is now saying that email was not legally binding thus the author did not have the right to release it under and open source license thus that license was not legally valid. If you had forked it and continued to use it, AMD could take you to court and say that the license you are operating under is legally invalid.

AppArmor is part of the kernel. Why does it require patches?

I’m interpreting that as clickbait - just something they added to the title to drive traffic.

Sure. Most people will stick with Windows or macOS and that doesn’t bother me. In fact I’m happy that people who want simplicity have those options because it means less pressure for Linux to turn into that.

Not that they are shit tbf.

That’s your opinion. My opinion is that Windows is a garbage fire.