Retpoline v5 Published For Fending Off Spectre Branch Target Injection

[audir8]

I'm guessing these patches will be back-ported to 4.14 or 4.15 once they're in 4.16-rc*. Which GCC versions (5.x, 6.x) will be getting the patches?

[andreano]

Retpoline = trampoline return = Some kind of indirect return to defend against return oriented programming?

Just guessing.

> Does every program have to be recompiled

Since we're talking about Spectre, yes, that must be the null hypothesis. But the kernel is also more important to defend than the sum of all userspace programs, considering that the kernel can access other programs' memory.

[eydee]

Without getting too convoluted... Does every program have to be recompiled with the new GCC, or just the kernel?

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Retpoline v5 Published For Fending Off Spectre Branch Target Injection

David Woodhouse of Amazon has sent out the latest quickly-revising patches for introducing the "Retpoline" functionality to the Linux kernel for mitigating the Spectre "variant 2" attack...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Retpoline-v5-Published