Re: Meltdown / Spectre

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hello,

Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> skribis:

> On Wed, Jan 10, 2018 at 05:39:59AM +0800, Alex Vong wrote:
>> I have an idea. Should we add a news entry to Guix blog[0] summarizing
>> all the above? For example, we can advice users to install noscript and
>> turn off javascript by default and only enable it on trusted site when
>> necessary.
>
> I think it's a good idea to publish an advisory of some sort but I don't
> know if I'll have time in the next few days to write it.

It’s a good idea.  I think the message you sent at the beginning of this
thread would be a good start.  Not much more needs to be added at this
point, IMO.

>> About the "Retpoline" mitigation technique[1]. Right now only GCC 7.2.0
>> is patched, but our default gcc version is 5.4.0 in master and 5.5.0 in
>> core-updates.  So I tried to apply the patches apply the patches to
>> 5.5.0. There are totally 17 commits/patches. The first 3 patch can be
>> modified to work while the 4th patch cannot be easily modified to work
>> because the function ``ix86_nopic_noplt_attribute_p'' is not present on
>> 5.5.0. Perhaps discarding the hunk would be fine, but we need to be
>> careful about it (maybe running tests make sure the fix really works).
>> 
>> Do you think we should modify the patch to make it work on GCC 5 or
>> update core-updates to GCC 7 instead?
>
> So far I haven't had time to read about Retpoline, how it works, and the
> degree to which other mitigations work without it. So the following
> opinion is from a place of ignorance. I'm very interested to hear what
> everyone else thinks about your suggestion.
>
> Having said that, my opinion is that it's too late in this core-updates
> cycle to change the default GCC version, especially two major versions,
> from 5 to 7.

No doubt about it.  :-)

> Something we can do very easily, even on the master branch, is to build
> specific packages with GCC 7, assuming the Retpoline technique would be
> effective in that context.

Yes, I see Alex submitted a patch already.

Thanks,
Ludo’.