An industry-wide issue was found with the manner in which many modern microprocessor designs have implemented speculative execution of instructions (a commonly used performance optimization). There are three primary variants of the issue which differ in the way the speculative execution can be exploited. All three rely upon the fact that modern high performance microprocessors implement both speculative execution, and utilize VIPT (Virtually Indexed, Physically Tagged) level 1 data caches that may become allocated with data in the kernel virtual address space during such speculation.
This issue is affecting almost all modern versions of Linux inclduing RHEL & CentOS 5, 6, 7 as well as Debian, Ubuntu and SuSE distributions. Customers under our Linux System Monitoring & Support Subscription is now informed for emergency software update.
Please reach our helpdesk with your designated support account with us, or reach info@entinux.com for any assistance.
