ARM's Spectre & Meltdown Mitigation Being Backported To Linux 4.15

For the Linux 4.16 merge window ARM submitted Spectre and Meltdown mitigation for the 64-bit ARM architecture while now those security changes are being called for backporting to the Linux 4.15 stable series.

Will Deacon of ARM Holdings sent in a Git pull request to Greg KH for getting their Spectre and Meltdown mitigations into the Linux 4.15 stable tree. Another developer meanwhile is working on getting this code backported to Linux 4.14.

Normally backports of invasive work aren't permitted to stable trees, but as we've seen with the x86 Spectre/Meltdown mitigation, given the severity and high impact, the stable trees have seen a lot of additional churn over the past month.

The 4.15 pull request can be found here.