Jon Masters On Understanding Spectre & Meltdown CPU Vulnerabilities

Arguably the most interesting keynote at this year's FOSDEM event was Red Hat's Jon Masters talking about the Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities on an interesting technical level.

While Jon Masters is mostly known for his involvement with Fedora/RedHat on ARM hardware, he was the lead for Red Hat's mitigation efforts around the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities that rocked the world last month.

Jon's keynote presentation covered the microarchitecture of modern CPUs, helped listeners understand CPU caches / virtual memory / branch prediction / speculative execution, and finally went on to talk about the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities with the current approaches and solutions for mitigating these high impact issues.

If you are interested in learning more, there is a WebM video recording of his presentation as well as the PDF slide deck.