Linux To Report MIPS Vulnerabilities But They Often Go Unreported Or Dead Vendors

The Linux kernel with the likes of ARM and x86 hardware leverage kernel infrastructure for reporting their relevant CPU security mitigations while only now the MIPS kernel code is seeing work to report such vulnerabilities. However, on the MIPS front it's more difficult with some vendors not publicly acknowledging vulnerabilities and other cases of MIPS hardware vendors no longer producing the hardware in question or even in business.

Sent out yesterday were patches providing MIPS vulnerabilities infrastructure for the Linux kernel, similar to that for other architectures.

With the patches developer Jiaxun Yang acknowledges the sad state of affairs for MIPS, "Add infrastructure to display CPU vulnerabilities. As most MIPS CPU vendors are dead today and we can't confirm vulnerabilities states with them, we'll display vulnerabilities as "Unknown" by default and override them in cpu-probe.c"

As for what is known about the state of CPU vulnerabilities for MIPS, the P5600/P6600 are known to be affected by Spectre V1 and Spectre V2. Loongson 64C is known to be vulnerable to Meltdown. Of all the MIPS hardware that's out there, those are the only known states on the MIPS front to developers and thus all that will be reported for now with the proposed addition to Linux.

At least though this will now integrate into the Linux sysfs vulnerabilities reporting so that the limited information that is available can be easily exposed.