From a recently posted patch set:

Subject: Avoid speculative indirect calls in kernel

Any speculative indirect calls in the kernel can be tricked to execute any kernel code, which may allow side channel attacks that can leak arbitrary kernel data.

So we want to avoid speculative indirect calls in the kernel.

There's a special code sequence called a retpoline that can do indirect calls without speculation. We use a new compiler option -mindirect-branch=thunk-extern (gcc patch will be released separately) to recompile the kernel with this new sequence.

We also patch all the assembler code in the kernel to use the new sequence.