Really? The long technical explanation, with the word "shouty" is not adult? The plea for sensible discussion?
Your post isn't worth responding to beyond that. You've taken extreme liberties in your reading of his response. "Directly insulting Linus" lmfao are you fucking kidding me? You're calling "shouty" as directly insulting, when it's a response to "Fucking morons" writing "garbage" code? This is disingenuous at best if not willfully ignorant.
Cheap jokes about Linus's behavior?????
Seriously, take a step back and realize the loops you're jumping through to try to somehow justify Linus's behavior by attacking a reasoned response to it.
Linus' tone is not really defensible, but I just don't think the response compares favourably either.
And, perhaps more importantly, Linus' concerns aren't addressed and the response isn't particularly informative. dwmw2 mentions in comments here on this HN thread that he has been pushing back on Linus' concerns, but the response appears rather to defend those decisions in Intel. Perhaps I misread?
People in this thread are making the (understandable) mistake of assuming that Linus' remarks were aimed at individual engineers at Intel. But they obviously weren't: they were clearly aimed at senior management at Intel to say "we're not going to accept garbage from you."
And I don't even care if it was garbage. Because either it was garbage, or they failed to demonstrate to Linus that it was not garbage. Either way this is entirely Intel's fault.
Some snippets from the response:
> since the peanut gallery is paying lots of attention it's probably worth explaining it a little more for their benefit
> not just drop it quietly because poor Davey is too scared that Linus might shout at him again
> If we can be done with the shouty part, I'd actually quite like to have a sensible discussion
None of this is adult. I'm not directly defending Linus' tone, or claiming that he's "more adult", but derogating and condescending the audience reading these public posts (1st quote), making cheap jokes about Linus' behaviour (2nd quote) and directly insulting Linus (3rd quote) is not what I would define as an "adult" response. Linus' email at least only gets angry and offensive while critiquing the code, and doesn't get personal.
> The rant contains no valuable information, the response is excellent and far more informative
Linus' "rant" informed me that Intel are setting IBRS as a default-off feature that must be asked for - offloading responsibility for security to the software. The response opens by condescending me, tells me that IBRS is expensive (we know), retpoline is performant, and the informativeness seems to stop there.
It then posits that as somehow justifying the offloading of said responsibility with the following:
> Then along came Paul with the cunning plan of "oh, indirect branches can be exploited? Screw it, let's not have any of those then", which is retpoline.
> But wait, why did I say "mostly"? Well, not everyone has a retpoline compiler yet... but OK, screw them; they need to update.
"Screw them" is the crux of his answer to Linus' concerns. Sorry, how is this in any way an adult response?