I'm sure by now most computer users have heard about the Intel Meltdown & Spectre issue. It's a hardware based flow that was discovered in last year, but only reached the public last week (which wasn't supposed to happen for another week or so), and it's said that computer chips that were produced with the past 10 years are candidates for the vulnerability. While Intel has been widely involved in it, ARM and some AMD chips are also candidates. Both these vulnerabilities, 'Meltdown' & Spectre, are caused by exploitable weaknesses that exist in the data cache inside the CPU.
Major operating systems providers such as Microsoft has already provided with some patches, but it has been problematic where it has caused some computers to not to boot anymore. Ubuntu has also pushed some updates (around yesterday) for some of its LTS releases, but there has been some problems with that also. Keep an eye on the 'Ubuntu Security Notices' page, for it'll notify you about the current situation. That said, Intel has released a microdata update for Spectre, so Linux distributions should add these updates to their security updates soon.
RedHat has also been quite active from the beginning by providing both fixes and other insights concerning the issue. The point is however, all these fixes will reduce the performance of your CPU on certain work-loads. And depending on the type of the work-load, it can be as hard as 20% decrease in performance! We'll see what new news the next couple of days bring.
Below is a video from RedHat explaining the vulnerability in simple terms so anyone can get a sense of what's happening:
Major operating systems providers such as Microsoft has already provided with some patches, but it has been problematic where it has caused some computers to not to boot anymore. Ubuntu has also pushed some updates (around yesterday) for some of its LTS releases, but there has been some problems with that also. Keep an eye on the 'Ubuntu Security Notices' page, for it'll notify you about the current situation. That said, Intel has released a microdata update for Spectre, so Linux distributions should add these updates to their security updates soon.
RedHat has also been quite active from the beginning by providing both fixes and other insights concerning the issue. The point is however, all these fixes will reduce the performance of your CPU on certain work-loads. And depending on the type of the work-load, it can be as hard as 20% decrease in performance! We'll see what new news the next couple of days bring.
Below is a video from RedHat explaining the vulnerability in simple terms so anyone can get a sense of what's happening:
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