Linux

21.8    Spectre, Meltdown, and Others

In the winter of 2018, it became known that CPUs from several manufacturers (Intel is particularly affected) contain serious design flaws that allow a process to read the data of other processes without permission. The first such vulnerabilities were given the illustrious names of Spectre and Meltdown. Since then, various other related problems have been discovered: Fallout, Foreshadow, RIDL, ZombieLoad, and so on (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transient_execution_CPU_vulnerability).

Because it is neither technically nor economically possible to replace all affected CPUs, attempts have since been made to work around the errors in various ways. The four main starting points are as follows:

• Microcode ...