Linus Torvalds Sees Lots of Hardware Headaches Ahead

'Linux founder Linus Torvalds "warns that managing software is about
to become a lot more challenging, largely because of two hardware
issues that are beyond the control of DevOps teams," reports
DevOps.com.

An anonymous reader shares their report about Torvalds remarks at the
KubeCon + CloudNative + Open Source Summit China conference:

The first, Torvalds said, is the steady stream of patches being
generated for new cybersecurity issues related to the speculative
execution model that Intel and other processor vendors rely on to
accelerate performance... Each of those bugs requires another patch to
the Linux kernel that, depending on when they arrive, can require
painful updates to the kernel, Torvalds told conference attendees.
Short of disabling hyperthreading altogether to eliminate reliance on
speculative execution, each patch requires organizations to update
both the Linux kernel and the BIOS to ensure security. Turning off
hyperthreading eliminates the patch management issue, but also reduces
application performance by about 15 percent.

The second major issue hardware issue looms a little further over the
horizon, Torvalds said. Moore's Law has guaranteed a doubling of
hardware performance every 18 months for decades. But as processor
vendors approach the limits of Moore's Law, many developers will need
to reoptimize their code to continue achieving increased performance.
In many cases, that requirement will be a shock to many development
teams that have counted on those performance improvements to make up
for inefficient coding processes, he said.'

-- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/06/28/2245250

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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