x86/urgent Updates Sent In To Linux 5.8 With The Speculation Mitigation Fixes
Making this pull of x86/urgent fixes notable is that it does include the work I first reported on a few days ago regarding a Google engineer uncovering some holes in Linux's Spectre mitigation handling. Some handling could result in some mitigation behavior being unfairly applied to AMD CPUs and in other fixes for addressing an issue that applications could be silently vulnerable to Spectre Variant Two attacks when thinking they are mitigated but in fact not. There is also a fix for a buggy optimization that could lead to Spectre V4 SSBD mitigation to be disabled for child processes.
All of those speculation mitigation fixes are also marked for being back-ported to the supported Linux kernel stable series and just not 5.8.
Also included in this x86/urgent pull is a fix for jiffies to jiffies64 mapping, a reboot quirk fix for MacBook6,1, and adding Ice Lake micro-server and Tiger Lake CPUs to the support for the kernel's recently added split lock detection.
The list of patches can be found via the pull request
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.