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Some Qualcomm CPUs Left Exposed To Spectre Vulnerabilities On Mainline Linux


Some Qualcomm processors/SoCs on the mainline Linux kernel are left vulnerable to Spectre security issues since Qualcomm hasn't upstreamed patches for properly treating affected CPU cores to their relevant mitigations

Google engineer Douglas Anderson sent out a set of patches this past week for aiming to get the Qualcomm CPU cores needing Spectre security mitigations in place for the mainline Linux kernel. As it stands now some CPU vendors may not be too inclined for opting into security mitigations due to often associated performance penalties, acknowledging the hardware vulnerabilities, or simply oversight/resource constraints. "Whilst only Qualcomm can say definitively whether or not they are affected (and what values of 'k' are required for the loop-based workarounds), I can't help but wonder whether the current mitigation code is structured the wrong way around in this case.

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