Linux 4.9, 4.14, 4.16 Point Releases Bring SSBD For Spectre V4

Greg Kroah-Hartman has today released the Linux 4.9.102, 4.14.43, and 4.16.11 kernels. Most notable about these stable release updates is Spectre Variant Four mitigation.

Today's 4.9/4.14/4.16 point releases carry the Intel/AMD mitigation for Spectre V4 albeit the Intel support is dependent upon to-be-released microcode updates and is vulnerable by default while for AMD processors there is SSB disabled via prctl and seccomp.

The list of changes/fixes can be found for 4.9.102, 4.14.43, and 4.16.11.

These releases only carry the x86 CPU Speculative Store Bypass Disable (SSBD) handling and not for today's ARM64 and POWER mitigation handling.

Expect this Spectre mitigation to be refined. I'll have some AMD benchmarks coming up shortly while unfortunately the Intel microcode update I was expecting to be sent over hasn't arrived yet.