Linux 4.19.7 Released With Important PCI Express Fix, New & Improved STIBP

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released Linux 4.19.7 today as another rather eventful point release in the Linux 4.19 stable series. He's also updated the older LTS branches too should you be depending upon them.

Linux 4.19.7 is notable in that it back-ported the new STIBP code for offering better behavior around the cross-HT Spectre V2 mitigation in that it only applies to opt-in processes via prctl and SECCOMP by default rather than all processes, so the system performance isn't clobbered. This is the code merged last weekend to Linux 4.20 Git and so now everything is back to smooth sailing with upstream Linux performance.

The other notable change to Linux 4.19.7 is a PCI Express code fix that was causing issues up to now for those using PCI Express 3.0 graphics cards on older motherboards supporting PCIe 1.0/2.0. This was causing issues in particular for Radeon GPUs although the bug and resulting fix are in the kernel's common PCIe code.

Not yet in the stable kernel is any fix to the "EXT4 corruption issue" introduced in Linux 4.19. But as covered yesterday, that's looking to be a BLK-MQ regression. If that all pans out, hopefully for Linux 4.19.8 in a few days it will be safe from the data corruption problem.

Besides Linux 4.19.7 there is also 4.14.86 and 4.9.143 for rounding out today's stable activity.