Meltdown and Spectre
maddog's Doghouse

A serious security problem requires your attention.
I was lying in my bed in the early morning of January 3rd, 2018 when a tweet woke me from my sleep; not a tweet from a bird (nor from the president of the United States), but a tweet from a security researcher discussing two rather bad hardware issues with a large number of CPU chips.
These issues, now known as "Meltdown" and "Spectre," have been rocking the computing world for the past couple of days. Unlike many other security exploits, these are not really "fixable" by a simple software patch, are not operating-system specific, and cannot be avoided by telling your mother not to post her password on her computer screen.
Both have to do with modern hardware architecture and an issue called "out-of-order instruction execution," used to speed up the processor. Sometimes this feature is used to fetch instructions on both sides of a branch (both the "true" and the "false" side), so as soon as the condition is known, the instructions are ready to execute. Access to this "pre-fetched" data could allow a carefully crafted user-level program to access kernel memory, and once that happens, any data on the machine is vulnerable to be read, including passwords, security certificates, and so forth.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

News
-
Red Hat Releases RHEL 10 Early
Red Hat quietly rolled out the official release of RHEL 10.0 a bit early.
-
openSUSE Joins End of 10
openSUSE has decided to not only join the End of 10 movement but it also will no longer support the Deepin Desktop Environment.
-
New Version of Flatpak Released
Flatpak 1.16.1 is now available as the latest, stable version with various improvements.
-
IBM Announces Powerhouse Linux Server
IBM has unleashed a seriously powerful Linux server with the LinuxONE Emperor 5.
-
Plasma Ends LTS Releases
The KDE Plasma development team is doing away with the LTS releases for a good reason.
-
Arch Linux Available for Windows Subsystem for Linux
If you've ever wanted to use a rolling release distribution with WSL, now's your chance.
-
System76 Releases COSMIC Alpha 7
With scores of bug fixes and a really cool workspaces feature, COSMIC is looking to soon migrate from alpha to beta.
-
OpenMandriva Lx 6.0 Available for Installation
The latest release of OpenMandriva has arrived with a new kernel, an updated Plasma desktop, and a server edition.
-
TrueNAS 25.04 Arrives with Thousands of Changes
One of the most popular Linux-based NAS solutions has rolled out the latest edition, based on Ubuntu 25.04.
-
Fedora 42 Available with Two New Spins
The latest release from the Fedora Project includes the usual updates, a new kernel, an official KDE Plasma spin, and a new System76 spin.