Linux 4.17 Gets More Spectre V1 Fixes

Thomas Gleixner this morning sent in the latest batch of x86/pti updates for containing the latest mitigation improvements around Meltdown and Spectre CPU vulnerabilities.

This latest pull request has several fixes, including a possible deadlock fix. There have also been a number of Spectre Variant One access restrictions.

Similar to the recent Spectre V1 fixes for the Linux sound drivers, these latest array indexing fixes for kernel code was uncovered via Smatch. The Smatch static analysis tool designed for analyzing the Linux kernel code recently picked up support for spotting potential Spectre vulnerabilities dealing with possible bounds check bypass. The latest Smatch code for those interested can be found here.

The list of updates/fixes for the Linux 4.17 kernel can be found via this pull request.