He doesn't list what the mistakes will be. He said that he fears that because hardware people aren't software people, that they will make the same mistakes that x86 made, which were then made by Arm later.
He did mention that fixing those mistakes was faster for Arm than x86, so that brings hope that fixing the mistakes on Risc V will take less time
No, it was about the prediction engines that contain security vulnerabilities. Problem is that software has no control over that, because hardware does future predictions for performance optimization.
Prediction is a hard problem when coupled with caches. It relatively easy to say that no speculative instruction has any effect until it's confirmed taken if you ignore caches. However caches need to fetch information from memory to allow an instruction to evaluate, and rewinding a cache to it's previous state on a mispredict is almost impossible. Especially when you consider that the amount of time you're executing non-speculative code on a modern processor is very low.
Not having predictions is consigning yourself to 1990s performance, with faster clocks.
Not OP, but consider using FUTO Keyboard. It's made by the group Louis Rossmann works with, and it has offline speech to text (no sending data to Google), swipe keyboard, and completions. It's also source-available, which isn't as good as open source, but you could examine the code and verify their claims if you wanted to.
I'm using it and, while it's not perfect, it's way better than the open source Android keyboards with swiping that I've tried.
Thanks, will try it out! I need an emoji picker though. Does it have that?
Edit: typing with it now. It had an emoji picker. 👍
I like the picker's grouping, actually. Body parts (hands) are closer to faces.
The recent emoji section doesn't work.
It doesn't have the latest emoji set, as far as I can tell.
The swiping is much more sensitive than Gboard. I'm not a fan as of yet. Maybe it's still learning. Seems like it can't handle the speed as well as Gboard can.
Prediction suggestions are terrible so far.
I don't like that swipe delete doesn't delete whole words.
All in all, I don't think I can recommend it in its current state.
But, if you type by pressing buttons, the predictions are actually pretty good. Maybe that saves a bit of time if you're very stationary and not on the move.
Yeah, it's very much alpha software, but it works surprisingly well for being in such an early state. I'm using it as my keyboard now, and it works well enough, but certainly not perfect.
Then again, I'm willing to deal with a lot of nonsense to avoid Google, so YMMV.
I hear the speech to text is pretty good. I haven't tried it (I hate dictation), but maybe you could give it a whirl before you give up on it, it's supposed to be its killer feature.
Instruction creep maybe? Pretty sure I've also seen stuff that seems to show that Torvalds is anti-speculative-execution due to its vulnurabilities, so he could also be referring to that.