Intel security patch licence barring benchmarking withdrawn following Bruce Perens' criticism

Intel embarrassed into licence climbdown

Intel has withdrawn a clause in the licence for a security patch issued this week following complaints led by open source luminary Bruce Perens.

The clause had forbidden Windows 10 users from publishing benchmarks - benchmarks that might highlight the performance hit on systems as a result of patch.

The patch was rushed out following the disclosure of the Foreshadow CPU security flaw last week. It also contained new code to mitigate the risks posed by the Spectre, one of the two CPU security flaws publicised in January.

Open-source luminary Bruce Perens had spoken out about what was widely regarded as an attempt to cover-up the performance hit users might experience as a result of the patches Intel has been forced to issue.

These flaws have disproportionately affected Intel microprocessors, with AMD, ARM and other CPU designers and manufacturers much less affected.

Perens was commenting on a new restriction inserted into the software licence agreement that accompanies the latest patches Microsoft has rushed out this week to mitigate the risks posed by the Foreshadow and Spectre CPU security flaws.

"You will not, and will not allow, any third party to... publish or provide any software benchmark or comparison test results," Intel's new agreement states.

Effectively, claimed Perens, Intel was attempting to prevent users from publishing the results of comparative before-and-after benchmarks.

"Since the microcode is running for every instruction, this seems to be a use restriction on the entire processor. Don't run your benchmarker at all, not even on your own software, if you "provide" or publish the results," wrote Perens in a blog post.

He added: "The security fixes are known to significantly slow down Intel processors, which won't just disappoint customers and reduce the public regard of Intel, it will probably lead to lawsuits (if it hasn't already). [Editor's note: It has]

"Suddenly having processors that are perhaps 5% to 10% slower, if they are to be secure, is a significant damage to many companies that run server farms or provide cloud services. I'm not blaming Intel for this, I don't know if Intel could have forseen the problem."

Microsoft issued the stand-alone patches for Windows 10 this week. The patch applies to a wide range of Intel CPUs, from 2012's Ivy Bridge to CPUs bearing the latest eighth-generation microarchitecture, dubbed Coffee Lake.

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