Nah, it was more than that: The patches do things like add the garbage MSR writes to the kernel entry/exit points. That's insane. That says "we're trying to protect
the kernel". We already have retpoline there, with less overhead.
Yes, but as far as I know Linus has made no comment on the microcode patches, so mm-vorticesoft is probably referring to the Spectre patches in general.
When I read it I believed that Linus was implying that the suggested mitigation was so insane that it seemed like Intel MIGHT be hiding how broken they believed their hardware was with such over-the-top reactions. As well as indirectly asking if they believed the currently accepted mitigation method (retpoline) was considered ineffective.
