Meltdown and Specter Linux Kernel Status

Greg Kroah-Hartman, the stable kernel maintainer, released updates 4.14.12, 4.9.75 and 4.4.110, mainly porting patches of Meltdown and Specter patches to the stable kernel branch, which he later introduced on his “Meltdown and Spectre Linux Kernel Status” personal blog.

Kroah-Hartman said that most distributions are already patched, but users will not be lucky if they use kernel versions other than 4.4, 4.9, 4.14 or no distribution support. However, compared to fixing the Meltdown and Specter vulnerabilities, the kernel currently used by the user apparently contains hundreds of other vulnerabilities. The users need not worry about Meltdown and Specter but more pressing other security vulnerabilities.

He suggested that users update the system in time. For the majority of Android users, the new loopholes really is not a big problem.

In addition, Kroah-Hartman said he has not seen patches for any of the other architectures except x86 and arm64. There are rumors that patches may appear in some enterprise versions of some other processor types, hoping the patches will surface in a couple of weeks and merge upstream. He does not know when it will happen, so Kroah-Hartman suggests asking this question on the arch-specific mailing list to get a straight answer if it depends on a particular architecture.

Reference: kroah