RHEL 7.7 Beta Comes With MDS/Zombieload Mitigations

Written by Michael Larabel in Red Hat on 6 June 2019 at 04:58 PM EDT. 3 Comments
RED HAT
Arriving yesterday coincidentally on the Phoronix 15th birthday was the beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.7

While Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 has been under GA since early May, RHEL 7.7 is the latest continuation of RHEL7 as part of their ten-year lifecycle. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.7 release will also mark the end of the "full support phase" for the RHEL7 lifecycle.

With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.7 Beta there are mitigations in place for the Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) / Zombieload vulnerabilities affecting Intel CPUs. Also on the CPU vulnerability front, Retpolines are now in place rather than IBRS as the default Spectre Variant Two mitigation to lower the performance overhead and also matches the behavior of RHEL 8.0.

The RHEL 7.7 Beta also includes updates to their network stack, access to Red Hat Insights as part of the RHEL subscription, and other changes. RHEL 7.7 also adds new Python 3 packages that were previously part of the Red Hat Software Collections.

More details on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.7 Beta via the Red Hat Blog.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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