With Intel’s Core 2 Duo processor errata announcement came immediate and conflicting messages from both the Linux and BSD communities. Are we supposed to worry about these CPU bugs, or not?

Every piece of computer hardware has bugs; some are more significant than others, and how operating systems deal with these errors is part of what separates the good from the bad. Once the bugs are discovered, they are difficult to fix because operating system programmers have already found a way to code around the bugs, and fixing them may harm those workarounds. Important bugs are sometimes fixed, and that’s part of the reason why there are multiple revisions or generations of CPUs. As a normal consumer you don’t know about these revisions unless you read up on technology and read model numbers closely, but CPU errata is something that operating system programmers have to be acutely aware of.

That’s why the stories about how open source operating system programmers are dealing with these bugs have bothered me. On the one side there is Linus Torvalds, who dismisses the errata as unimportant. On the other side of the issue are Theo de Raadt and Matt Dillon, two of the BSD world’s most prolific and technically brilliant programmers, who say that these bugs are severe and definitely worth paying attention to for security and stability reasons. Linus makes judgments about patches and spends most of his time managing people; Theo and Matt spend more time writing code. Which ones would you trust to evaluate the seriousness of hardware bugs — the manager or the coders?

Yeah, me too. On the other hand, you have to take into account the personalities of the people involved. You don’t have to give Linus much of a reason to be dismissive and snarky; or Theo a reason to take a jab at hardware manufacturers; or Matt a reason to say that there’s a better way to code it. Considering their backgrounds, these attitudes are frequently justified.

Don’t let this turn you away from the Core 2 Duo. All CPUs have errata, some of which is significant. The Core 2 Duo is still the fastest, most electricity-efficient CPU on the market today, it it is precisely what I would build a desktop computer around at this point in time, even considering the errata list.

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Copyright 2007 JEM Electronic Media, Inc. No reprints without written permission.