Re: Meltdown – Spectre

[markham breitbach]

>
> The fact that FreeBSD still works on this problem whereas Microsoft
> and Linux kernel folks already released their patches to me speaks
> highly of FreeBSD. FreeBSD appears to do really thorough job. As
> example, I would mention this: Linux (CentOS aka "binary replica" of
> RedHat Enterprise) often after releasing kernel patch, releases second
> kernel patch 2-3 days later. Which makes all who maintain parks of
> Linux machines and patch them promptly reboot the machines twice in a
> course of few days. There are special cases sometimes, but mostly this
> is indication of not thorough enough work. I don't remember similar
> things happen to FreeBSD. This pretty much reminds me how someone
> concluded that ATI does more thorough work on drivers compared to
> NVIDIA, pointing to the fact that ATI releases drivers only twice a
> year, whereas NVIDIA has to constantly release drivers updates: Monthly.
>
> Just my $0.02
>
> Valeri
>

It also appears that Microsoft and Linux a fair amount of extra lead
time.  I understand they were notified about this back in October ort
November, while FreeBSD did not get notified until December.

-M