LattePanda wrote: ↑Mon Jan 22, 2018 7:08 am Hi, it is a big topic, not sure how will the intel process it , we will concerned about this . Thanks for your concern and feedback.
Wish you all have a nice day.

It's already possible to patch the kernel from Spectre & Meltdown on Linux without any BIOS/Microcode updates from Linux.
I've managed to do it by compiling a new version of GCC that supports the following CC flags:

Code: Select all

-mindirect-branch -mindirect-branch-register This can be retrieved from here: https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/tree/gcc-7-branch ( Optionally using the GCC-8 branch as well. )
All you need to do after is recompile the kernel with the CONFIG_RETPOLINE flag set to yes. ( Which should be enabled by default on the latest kernels. )

This patches both Spectre v2 and Meltdown. ( Make sure you enable CONFIG_PAGE_TABLE_ISOLATION when compiling the kernel to mitigate Meltdown. )
I see absolutely no performance degredation using these patches on my LattePanda v1.1 64 GB.

spectre+meltdown.png (75.92 KiB) Viewed 2706 times Mitigating v1 involves manually patching the kernel in special places to introduce the LFENCE OpCode and generally depends on your kernel compilation.

An upgraded version of Windows 10 is enough to patch Meltdown without a BIOS update however it will not patch Spectre variants.

P.S. You can get the script for Linux here: https://github.com/speed47/spectre-meltdown-checker

attachments:

spectre+meltdown.png

Spectre and Bios Updates?