POWER Changes On The Way To Linux 4.19 Include More Spectre Work
Highlights of the recent POWER activity of code making it into this next kernel cycle includes:
- A fix to their page table fragment allocator that could lead to memory corruption or other problems.
- Fixes to their pkey support that brings it in line with the x86 pkeys support.
- Drops support for POWER8 DDI and POWER9 DDI processors. As for these chips, the POWER code maintainer commented, "neither chip should be in use anywhere other than as a paper weight."
- Optimized "memcmp" for POWER7 and later using VMX instructions.
- Support for using the barrier no speculation on some NXP processors.
- Support for flushing the count cache on context switches for some IBM POWER CPUs as a Spectre Variant Two mitigation.
- Various other fixes and improvements.
The complete list of POWER patches for Linux 4.19 can be found via this mailing list post.
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