The Red Hat family of operating systems addressed Meltdown and Spectre in its v3.10 kernel quickly, but relied too much upon Intel’s flawed microcode and was forced to revert from a complete solution. Oracle implemented alternate approaches more suited to its v4.1 UEK, but both kernels continue to lack full Spectre coverage while they wait for Intel. Conspicuously absent from either Linux branch is Google’s retpoline, which offers far greater and more efficient coverage for all CPUs. Auditing this status is a challenge. This article presents the latest tools for vulnerability assessments.
A frenzy of patch activity has surrounded this year’s Meltdown and Spectre CPU vulnerability disclosures. Normally quiet microcode packages for Intel chips have seen four updates in the month of January, one of which was finally to roll back flawed code that triggers random reboots. For enterprise-grade hardware, Intel’s quality control has left much to be desired.
It is likely premature to deploy new monitoring and compliance tools, and a final solution for this set of vulnerabilities will wait until correct microcode is obtained. Still, it may be important for many organizations to evaluate the patch status of servers running Linux kernels packaged by Oracle and/or Red Hat.
Meltdown patches exist now and should be deployed immediately on vulnerable servers. Remediating all Spectre vulnerabilities requires not only the latest kernels, but also a patched GCC to compile the kernel that is capable of implementing “retpolines”, or compatible microcode from your CPU vendor.
Source: http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/meltdownspectre-status-red-hat-and-oracle
Submitted by: Arnfried Walbrecht
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