LinuxQuestions.org - Linux kernel 4.15 has been released

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Summary: Besides the latest code to deal with Meltdown/Spectre, this release includes modesetting and advanced display features for the amdgpu driver; improved power management support of systems with SATA Aggressive Link Power Management; a port for the open RISC-V CPUs; initial support for virtualized memory encryption in AMD CPUs; support for the Intel User Mode Instruction Prevention feature; support of the CPU controller in cgroups v2; a new mmap(2) flag to allow direct writes to persistent memory managed by filesystems; and many new drivers and other improvements.

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1.1. Meltdown/Spectre

This release contains the latest code to deal with Meltdown/Spectre, a security problem you probably have never heard of. Page Table Isolation to address Meltdown is supported for x86/Intel CPUs (it can be disabled with the pti=off kernel boot option); there is also the retpoline mechanism to mitigate spectre v2 (which affects both Intel and AMD), it requires a GCC version supporting the -mindirect-branch=thunk-extern functionality and it can be turned off with boot option spectre_v2=off (if you don't have such compiler, there will be a minimal retpoline mitigation that only exists in the kernel code written in assembly) The PowerPC architecture is also affected by Meltdown on many CPU models, and can prevent those attacks with a "RFI flush of L1-D cache" feature included in this release. ARM is also affected by meltdown, but patches for it are not included in this release. Spectre v1 is not addressed in this version.

A /sys/devices/system/cpu/vulnerabilities/ directory has been added that will show the vulnerabilities affecting your CPU and the mitigations being currently applied.

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1.4. New architecture: RISC-V

This release includes the main parts of the port to RISC-V CPUs. RISC-V is an open instruction set architecture that, unlike proprietary CPUs, can be freely used for any purpose, permitting anyone to design, manufacture and sell RISC-V chips and software.

The port is definitely a work in progress. While builds and boots, it's a bit hard to actually see anything happen because there are no device drivers yet.

Have any LQ members updated to 4.15?

--jeremy