That's a great article, thanks for posting it. Interesting note: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/02/intel_cpu_design_flaw/
From this article, The fix is to separate the kernel's memory completely from user processes using what's called Kernel Page Table Isolation, or KPTI. At one point, Forcefully Unmap Complete Kernel With Interrupt Trampolines, aka FUCKWIT, was mulled by the Linux kernel team, giving you an idea of how annoying this has been for the developers.
On Mon, Jan 8, 2018 at 9:28 AM, David Riley via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
On Jan 8, 2018, at 08:18, Dean Notarnicola via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
These flaws can be *potentially* exploited on any processor that features speculative execution​. No idea as to why there is no comprehensive list
of
affected CPUs as of yet.
Probably because a comprehensive list would be impossibly long. Anything that does speculative execution combined with caching is likely to be vulnerable.
I misspoke a bit ago; branch prediction does not inherently imply speculative execution, but it does imply speculative prefetching. There's some interesting explanatory material on why the ARM11 and Cortex-A7/A53 as used in the Raspberry Pi series are not vulnerable, for example:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/why-raspberry-pi-isnt- vulnerable-to-spectre-or-meltdown/