Linus Torvalds

大嘴王Linus再次出言不逊，这一次OpenBSD的一位开发人员迅速抓到了商机—-连夜印制了T-Shirt给fans们。Linus本人如此，你能指望Linux如何呢？

有人在有人问是不是要实现类似FreeBSD的ZERO_COPY_SOCKET的时候怒啦，说啦：“I claim that Mach people (and apparently FreeBSD) are incompetent idiots. Playing games with VM is bad. memory copies are also bad, but quite frankly, memory copies often have less downside than VM games, and bigger caches will only continue to drive that point home.”

可是：
a) ZERO_COPY_SOCKET 并非默认启用的功能。
b) FreeBSD在7年前就实现了这个功能，某些系统至今连这个选项都没有。
c) FreeBSD的zero_copy manpage明示了其性能影响。

我们来看看那个人说的这段话：

I’d be really surprised if somebody is actually able to get a real-world attack on a real-world pgp key usage or similar out of it (and as to the covert channel, nobody cares). It’s a fairly interesting approach, but it’s certainly neither new nor HT-specific, or necessarily seem all that worrying in real life.(HT and modern CPU speeds just means that the covert channel is _faster_ than it has been before, since you can test the L1 at core speeds. I doubt it helps the key attack much, though, since faster in that case cuts both ways: the speed of testing the cache eviction may have gone up, but so has the speed of the operation you’re trying to follow, and you’d likely have a really hard time trying to catch things in real life).

It does show that if you want to hide key operations, you want to be careful. I don’t think HT is at fault per se.