I keep getting a lot of private emails about my previous post about the latest status of the Linux kernel patches to resolve both the Meltdown and Spectre issues.

These questions all seem to break down into two different categories, “What is the state of the Spectre kernel patches?”, and “Is my machine vunlerable?”

State of the kernel patches

As always, lwn.net covers the technical details about the latest state of the kernel patches to resolve the Spectre issues, so please go read that to find out that type of information.

And yes, it is behind a paywall for a few more weeks. You should be buying a subscription to get this type of thing!

Is my machine vunlerable?

For this question, it’s now a very simple answer, you can check it yourself.

Just run the following command at a terminal window to determine what the state of your machine is:

1 $ grep . /sys/devices/system/cpu/vulnerabilities/*

On my laptop, right now, this shows:

1 2 3 4 $ grep . /sys/devices/system/cpu/vulnerabilities/* /sys/devices/system/cpu/vulnerabilities/meltdown:Mitigation: PTI /sys/devices/system/cpu/vulnerabilities/spectre_v1:Vulnerable /sys/devices/system/cpu/vulnerabilities/spectre_v2:Vulnerable: Minimal generic ASM retpoline

This shows that my kernel is properly mitigating the Meltdown problem by implementing PTI (Page Table Isolation), and that my system is still vulnerable to the Spectre variant 1, but is trying really hard to resolve the variant 2, but is not quite there (because I did not build my kernel with a compiler to properly support the retpoline feature).

If your kernel does not have that sysfs directory or files, then obviously there is a problem and you need to upgrade your kernel!

Some “enterprise” distributions did not backport the changes for this reporting, so if you are running one of those types of kernels, go bug the vendor to fix that, you really want a unified way of knowing the state of your system.

Note that right now, these files are only valid for the x86-64 based kernels, all other processor types will show something like “Not affected”. As everyone knows, that is not true for the Spectre issues, except for very old CPUs, so it’s a huge hint that your kernel really is not up to date yet. Give it a few months for all other processor types to catch up and implement the correct kernel hooks to properly report this.

And yes, I need to go find a working microcode update to fix my laptop’s CPU so that it is not vulnerable against Spectre…