The Red Hat family of operating systems addressed Meltdown and Spectre in its v3.10 kernel quickly, but relied too much upon Intel’s flawed microcode and was forced to revert from a complete solution. Oracle implemented alternate approaches more suited to its v4.1 UEK, but both kernels continue to lack full Spectre coverage while they wait for Intel. Conspicuously absent from either Linux branch is Google’s retpoline, which offers far greater and more efficient coverage for all CPUs. Auditing this status is a challenge. This article presents the latest tools for vulnerability assessments.

Linux Journal

Red Hat and Oracle really needed to jump on this more then anyone they are providers of enterprise software.