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Open-source champion Bruce Perens has called out Intel for adding a new restriction to its software license agreement along with its latest CPU security patches to prevent developers from publishing software benchmark results.
The new clause appears to be a move by Intel to legally gag developers from revealing performance degradation caused by its mitigations for Spectre and Foreshadow or 'L1 Terminal Fault' (L1FT) flaw speculative attacks.
"You will not, and will not allow any third party to ... publish or provide any software benchmark or comparison test results," Intel's new agreement states .
[...] Another section of the license blocking redistribution appears to have caused maintainers of Debian to withhold Intel's patch too , as reported by The Register.
[...] Updated 12:15pm ET, August 23 2018: An Intel spokesperson responded: "We are updating the license now to address this and will have a new version available soon. As an active member of the open-source community, we continue to welcome all feedback."
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @12:02AM
Sadly I cannot unsolder the i7 my high-end "gaming" laptop came with and solder in a Ryzen. I might if I had the option, but cannot be. Intel might gag the distros, but not the users...
So far, my own experience with several machines, 3 or 4 i5-based an i-3 and two i7 machines is this: boot times are much. much slower. What was well under 20s is now around 40s. Application startup times are glacial. It sued to be when opening Inkscape, GiMP or Libre Writer that you would have the window appear within 3 seconds and fully up in the next 3 seconds (Libre maybe 7 seconds). Since the kernel has started to duck around the Intel defects .... well: nothing happens for about 8 seconds. Then the taskbar twitches and another 4 seconds late the app starts to reserve a window on the desktop. You watch in slow motion as the shaded border appears, then a blank panel, then the rest of the application elements grow into place. The i7's have a 40% edge in performance over say the i3. Working on the i3 is like Windows 3.11 over a Novell network. Nah, I lie - it is faster than that, but I have far more time to make and drink coffee than before.
Bottom line - Intel should be facing a worldwide class action to REPLACE every single chip AT THEIR COST.