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

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Security on 22 May 2018 at 04:35 PM EDT. 8 Comments
LINUX SECURITY
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.
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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.

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