OpenIndiana Now Has KPTI Support Up For Testing To Mitigate Meltdown

The Solaris-derived OpenIndiana operating system now has KPTI (Kernel Page Table Isolation) support for testing to mitigate the Intel Meltdown CPU vulnerability.

Thanks in large part to the work done by Joyent on KPTI support for SmartOS/OmniOSce, the Illumos kernel used by OpenIndiana now has a KPTI implementation for testing. They have spun up some live install images for testing as well as an IPS repository containing a KPTI-enabled kernel build. With this KPTI work is also PCID (Process Context Identifier) support too.

Any Illumos/OpenIndiana users wanting to test out this work for mitigating Meltdown on this open-source Solaris-derived platform, more details over on OpenIndiana.org. More background reading is also available via this blog post by one of the involved developers from late February.