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.
His overall point was a bewilderment at the incompetent and non-sensical patches that were being given as "fixes" in this issue. Linus was pointing out a particular instance of that, but this news and other behaviour from Intel seems to indicate this is part of an endemic, cultural, administrative issue inside the company.
OP is probably referencing the 'bullshit patches from Intel' comment from Linus about the patches they were sent, and that Microsoft might have been sent similar obfuscatory patches.
It's not the same company - David Woodhouse works for Amazon. He used to work for Intel but not for a year or so.
It's also not the same reason. Linus doesn't like the mitigation in the kernel, disagreeing on how Intel intends to implement it. This article is about unstable microcode patches that Intel retracted, and that retraction has been discussed on here a few times. The article is just exceedingly bad at describing the actual issue. It also doesn't help that the kernel mitigation depends on new flags introduced by the faulty microcode update, but the update being faulty is orthogonal to Linus' opinion.
