spectre_and_meltdown_fixes_-_release_dates_for_linux_distros

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spectre and Meltdown fixes - release dates for linux distros

Unfortunately the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities became Public too early. So now we are all keen on getting updates for our servers to work around the respective design issues in modern CPU's ASAP. Originally, the official announcement was planned for Jan. 9, so we can expect that by then most OS's including most Linux Distributions will have a fix in their repos which can simply be installed by running whatever your regular update routine is. That's

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

in ubuntu and

yum  update 

in RedHat and CentOS distributions.

this update will need a reboot of your server for sure, don't just update and continue to work without rebooting

However, now that the news is out, every OS vendor tries to be as fast as possible in pushing out patches, so possibly fixes will be released earlier. here is a list of links with information about updates available from linux distributions i care about:

  • Debian stretch is fixed as of kernel version 4.9.65-3+deb9u2
  • Ubuntu (first candidates available now in separate repo)
  • Proxmox VE debian based virtualization environment, fixed for Version 4 and 5 as explained in the linked forum post.
  • CentOS (started syncing to mirrors on Jan 4) kernel-3.10.0-693.11.6.el7.x86_64.rpm and related packages fix the bug

for further information read those pages or check out the meltdown webpage link section

the fix for all this works in a way that it may affect the system performance negatively. Different sources claim different results reaching from no impact at all up to a 30% slowdown. As always, Benchmarks are probably not too representative for your realworld experience. In order to find out what the difference in performance is, you can simply disable the workaround on a patched kernel to run your workload once with and once without the patch. the workaround can be disabled by passing the boot option pti=off.

  • spectre_and_meltdown_fixes_-_release_dates_for_linux_distros.1515421001.txt.gz
  • Last modified: 08.01.2018 15:16
  • by Pascal Suter