OpenBSD's Theo de Raadt on C2D

[BrowncoatGR]

Theo de Raadt [interview] described an active effort by OpenBSD developers to work around "serious bugs in Intel's Core 2 cpu". He went on to explain, "these processors are buggy as hell, and some of these bugs don't just cause development/debugging problems, but will *ASSUREDLY* be exploitable from userland code. As is typical, BIOS vendors will be very late providing workarounds / fixes for these processors bugs. Some bugs are unfixable and cannot be worked around. Intel only provides detailed fixes to BIOS vendors and large operating system groups. Open Source operating systems are largely left in the cold
http://kerneltrap.org/node/8472
:eek:

[Shintai]

Theo is a nutcase at best.

And Linus totally disagrees with him

http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm?action=detail&id=80552&threadid=80534&roomid=2

Gotta love his, OpenBSD is not affected with default binaries! As he wrote earlier.

But i´m sure Theo is one of the people that thought hyperthreading would lead to exploits too :rofl:

I really cant take that person serious in any way. he also forgets CPUs like Power6, Sparc etc got even more bugs. And what would he do else. He obviously says any CPU is too buggy. But i guess his ego lacked attention again.

[Jacky]

a comparison to the bugs of K8 would be really great..
but naturally such an older cpu arch will have less bugs and more workarounds.
imho saying that c2d has more (serious) bugs than any other x86 cpu has had is FUD (otherwise there would be already much more bad press about this topic).
anyway most of the bugs are rare show stoppers, which wont be exploited and only need a workaround.