Is Lx 3 as protected as it could be at this time from Spectre and Meltdown?

Just checking on this. Results in an up to date hardware Lx 3 system of the ‘spectre-meltdown-checker.sh’ script:

spectre-meltdown-checker.sh_output.txt (5.3 KB)

This paragraph bothers me a bit:

“The microcode your CPU is running on is known to cause instability problems,
such as intempestive reboots or random crashes.
You are advised to either revert to a previous microcode version (that might not have
the mitigations for Spectre), or upgrade to a newer one if available.”

And this summary is not entirely comforting:

How to fix: Both your CPU microcode and your kernel are lacking support for mitigation. If you’re using a distro kernel, upgrade your distro to get the latest kernel available. Otherwise, recompile the kernel from recent-enough sources. The microcode of your CPU also needs to be upgraded. This is usually done at boot time by your kernel (the upgrade is not persistent across reboots which is why it’s done at each boot). If you’re using a distro, make sure you are up to date, as microcode updates are usually shipped alongside with the distro kernel. Availability of a microcode update for you CPU model depends on your CPU vendor. You can usually find out online if a microcode update is available for your CPU by searching for your CPUID (indicated in the Hardware Check section).”

I don’t mean to be an alarmist but I do want to know if we are as protected as we could be.

FWIW:

$ rpm -qa | grep microcode
microcode-intel-20180108-1-omv2015.0.noarch

The latest shown at downloadcenter.intel.com is 20180425.

But I don’t know how that relates to the part about “This is usually done at boot time by your kernel” regarding updating microcode? Guess I need explanation from a developer?

EDIT: FWIW-2: Lx 3 is getting behind on kernel versions lately. Seems like we should have something 4.16.X as 4.16.12 is latest stable Linux kernel version and we seem stuck on 4.15.18. This is especially true now that Spectre and Meltdown are know issues.

EDIT: FWIW-3: “NOTE, 4.15.18 is the last release of the 4.15.x kernel.
It is now end-of-life.”