On Thu, 4 Jan 2018 22:13:16 +0000
Ken Moffat <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 04, 2018 at 08:16:18PM +0000, Ken Moffat wrote:
> > People who follow the news will be aware that big changes have been
> > rushed into the linux kernel (and changes are/have been also rolled
> > out by microsoft, and apparently by apple).
> > 
> > There are two vulnerabilities, with the shiny names of Meltdown and
> > Spectre.  Both refer to ways of userspace finding where the kernel
> > has been mapped, to try to do harm.   Page Table Isolation addresses
> > the first of these.  Google claim it affects some AMD processors,
> > AMD deny this.
> > 
> >.... 
> > PTI has been pushed into 4.15-rc6 as a matter of urgency, and
> > added to 4.14.11 with backports to 4.9 and 4.4 in progress.
> > 
> > Most testing, particularly by the 0-day kernel bot, has been on
> > Intel hardware and running this on AMD has uncovered some problems
> > which have been addressed in linus's tree and which will be in
> > 4.14.12.  With 4.14.12, if PTI is selected it will not be used at
> > runtime on an AMD machine with the default auto option, although I
> > think it can be forced by specifying the 'pti' boot argument.
> > 
> > If a kernel has been built with PTI, it can be disabled by
> > specifying 'nopti' in the command line.  Once a kernel has booted,
> > PTI cannot be enabled or disabled until you reboot.
> > 
> > If you are running with PTI enabled, dmesg will show
> >  Kernel/User page tables isolation: enabled
> > 
> 
> > ĸen  
> -- 

I have just built a 4.14.11 kernel with PTI and I can't boot it. I get a string 
of acpi errors and then a panic. As far as I can see, it's the same problem as 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1520265. That was cured by a bios 
update but I wouldn't date to do a thing like that.

Looks like I am stuck with 4.12.8 for the time being. The processor is pretty 
old, an Intel Core2 Duo. Maybe it's too old to be affected by Meltdown. I would 
value any advice.
-- 

Hazel
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