Regarding the KAISER/KASLR/KPTI work to mitigate the recently-announced "Spectre" and "Meltdown" issues in x86/x64 and some Arm processors, does anyone know how vulnerable MIPS processors might be? My initial guess is Spectre might apply, since MIPS CPUs have supported speculative execution as far back as the R10000, and even the R10K manual contained an entire section on "The side-effects of speculative execution", for SGI's non-coherent platforms (IP28, IP32). But MIPS is a varied ecosystem of CPUs, so if the arch is vulnerable, there might be specific MIPS CPU types that are not vulnerable. I am also uncertain if the way MIPS lays out its address space, with specific ranges for kernel mode, supervisor mode (unused), and user mode, makes this a non-issue. Thoughts? -- Joshua Kinard Gentoo/MIPS kumba@xxxxxxxxxx 6144R/F5C6C943 2015-04-27 177C 1972 1FB8 F254 BAD0 3E72 5C63 F4E3 F5C6 C943 "The past tempts us, the present confuses us, the future frightens us. And our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast, terrible in-between." --Emperor Turhan, Centauri Republic
