Linus Torvalds talks about hardware issues facing software development

At the KubeCon + CloudNative + Open Source Summit China conference, Linus Torvalds warned participants that software management is facing greater challenges, mainly because the two hardware issues are beyond the control of the development operations team.

The first issue is new security issues related to speculative execution model. The speculative execution model is used by Intel and other chip vendors to accelerate performance. A series of patches are required to fix the attack-related Linux kernels such as Spectre, Meltdown, Fallout, and ZombieLoad. Depending on the order and dependencies of the patch, the kernel needs to undergo painful updates, which can result in huge performance overhead, such as turning off hyperthreading, which can result in a 15% performance degradation.

The second problem is the limitations of the hardware. The software industry has benefited from the processor performance improvement brought by Moore’s Law in the past few decades, but Moore’s Law is approaching its limits, which means that the performance of the processor will not continue to increase. This means that software developers will need to optimize their code to improve performance and no longer use the inefficient code.

Via: devops