Kernel: Retpoline, VirtualBox, Linux 4.15 Next Weekend, and Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit
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Retpoline Is Still Being Improved Upon For Intel Skylake/Kabylake
While initial support for Retpoline was merged into the Linux 4.15 Git kernel last week and is now being backported to some supported Linux kernel series, there is still additional work ongoing for properly mitigating Spectre v2 on Intel Skylake CPUs and newer.
It turns out Skylake CPUs and newer require additional patches to fully mitigate against the Spectre Variant Two vulnerability. These newer CPUs can fallback to a potentially poisoned indirect branch predictor when a return buffer underflows. Andi Kleen of Intel has sent out a new patch series dubbed "RETPOLINE_UNDERFLOW" that gets enabled by default for Skylake CPUs and newer.
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VirtualBox Guest Driver Being Mainlined With Linux 4.16
The upcoming Linux 4.16 kernel cycle will be mainlining the VirtualBox Guest "vboxguest" kernel driver.
As part of an effort led by Red Hat, the VirtualBox guest drivers are finally working towards mainline in the Linux kernel and with 4.16 there is the vboxguest driver as a notable step following the VirtualBox DRM/KMS driver in Linux 4.13.
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Linus Torvalds Is Hopeful for a January 21 Release of the Linux 4.15 Kernel
The eighth and probably the last RC (Release Candidate) of the upcoming Linux 4.15 kernel series has been announced by Linus Torvalds over the weekend and it's now ready for public testing.
Coming a week after the seventh RC, Linux kernel 4.15 Release Candidate 8 is here with more patches against the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities publicly disclosed earlier this month. Most specifically, it brings x86 "retpoline" support, a solution developed by Google and other security researchers to not allow speculation on the CPU.
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LSFMM 2018 call for proposals
The 2018 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit will be held April 23-25 in Park City, Utah. The call for proposals has just gone out with a tight deadline: they need to be received by January 31.
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