More Spectre + Meltdown Updates Heading Into Linux 4.16

[phoronix]

Phoronix: More Spectre + Meltdown Updates Heading Into Linux 4.16

Thomas Gleixner who has been wrangling all of the Spectre and Meltdown related patches for the Linux kernel tree has submitted another pull request of more changes to land for the Linux 4.16 cycle that is nearing the end of its development...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-4.16-More-Spectre-Stuff

[RealNC]

Will that stuff get into LTS kernels?

[tildearrow]

Typo:

CPU feature bits ofr indicating PCONFIG / Total Memory Encryption presence.

[R00KIE]

Will that stuff get into LTS kernels?

Some of this stuff is already in stable kernels, at least the blacklist for skylake's 0xc2 microcode has been updated for a while now in 4.15, which is what I'm using now. I have an interest in this because the cpu in my laptop is a skylake.

The other stuff I have a vague idea that it was already included in the stable kernels.

[DanL]

Some of this stuff is already in stable kernels, at least the blacklist for skylake's 0xc2 microcode has been updated for a while now in 4.15

Stable != LTS
4.15 is not an LTS kernel. https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html

[Azrael5]

this kernel is too much important to be dropped in the April distros.

[Guest]

Will that stuff get into LTS kernels?

Not at the moment. I am sure it will be at some point. I'm on 4.14.27 (with three local patches) myself.

[linuxgeex]

Will that stuff get into LTS kernels?

AFAIK there's no LTS patches yet at Kernel.org but Ubuntu has patched for Meltdown and Spectre2 (Retpolines +- Intel Microcode) for an assortment of Ubuntu LTS kernels:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SecurityTeam...treAndMeltdown

I'd be shocked if this isn't also the case for RedHat/Fedora/Centos/Scientific, Debian, Oracle, and OpenSuSE/SLED/SLES as well.

Where you may run into problems will be with smaller distros running custom kernels with OpenVZ, ZFS etc. Those sub-systems won't have been patched by the larger maintainers and so those little distros will have to do the work themselves, which may take a while, if they do it at all.

[Guest]

Will that stuff get into LTS kernels?

They are queued for 4.14 LTS https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux...ree/queue-4.14