On January 06, 2018, Metztli IT released Metztli Reiser4 Linux 4.14.12-1 for Debian stretch-backports on AMD64 architecture -- which extensions are also licensed by Intel -- that addresses Meltdown (CVE-2017-5754) and Spectre (CVE-2017-5753 / CVE-2017-5715). Since we use reiser4 -enabled kernels even in our cloud environment solutions it was important to port the GCC-7 unstable (Sid) kernel to GCC-6 stretch-backports as soon as possible for our Google Compute Engine (GCE) deployments, since...
Google officials have come up with a mitigation called Retpoline that protects against branch target injection attacks, and has had negligible impact on server performance, according to the company.
This mitigation involves Kernel page table isolation (KPTI), described as a general technique to protect information residing in memory from other software that runs simultaneously. Google officials said that tests of KPTI on most of its own workloads, including cloud infrastructure, resulted in negligible performance impact, contrary to widespread speculation that the software caused significant performance slowdowns.1
Accordingly we made available our updated kernel on SourceForge. Additionally, we updated our Metztli Reiser4 Debian-Installer (d-i) minimal netboot ISO/USB media to download and install our latest updated kernel so as to address the above discussed issues. Both sets are available to download for free.
Of course, Metztli Reiser4 netboot ISO/USB image may be also downloaded from our site:
(Image is download link)
