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Re:Avoid speculative indirect calls in kernel by anfilt on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @08:30PM (#16067225)
Well there is spectre, and meltdown. Spectre is much more limited than meltdown. The patch AMD was referring to was for Meltdown.

Spectre at least does not leak ring-0 memory. Sure it means that some application might be able to read/infer memory values of other user-mode process.

Re:Avoid speculative indirect calls in kernel by mintplant on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @08:53PM (#16067350)
Spectre is much scarier than Meltdown, from my understanding, because it represents a whole class of strategies that lack a single fix, even at the hardware level.
Re:Avoid speculative indirect calls in kernel by earenndil on Thursday January 04, 2018 @12:42AM (#16068316)
My understanding is that it's not a bug of unintended behaviour, but rather a problem with the specification, all behaviour is as intended, but we need to have different behaviour. Which means that basically we need to get a new ISA -- or a new version of an existing one -- and transition everything to it.