Spectre / Meltdown CPU bugs - short notice reboots will be needed, little other info yet

Hello, As you're probably aware, it turns out that pretty much every CPU made in the last 10 years is broken, and while this affects almost all computers, this is going to have a particularly nasty effect on virtualisation providers such as BitFolk. The Xen project last night released the first version of their advisory which is XSA-254: https://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/advisory-254.html This is with no embargo, because the original embargo had to be abandoned by the discoverers of the bugs. As you can see, unfortunately the Xen project have no resolutions for any of this available as yet. There's three different issues here: 1. SP1/Spectre (CVE-2017-5753) 2. SP2/Spectre (CVE-2017-5715) 3. SP3/Meltdown (CVE-2017-5754) There isn't any known resolution for (1) yet. Xen are working on mitigations for (2). It's possible to avoid (3) by going to HVM mode, but that is a huge change that brings other problems with it. It can also be avoided by running in PVH mode, but very few guest kernels will be new enough to support that. Xen are hoping to come up with a way to run PV-inside-PVH but they're not ready with that yet. There will likely be other strategies to fix or mitigate these issues in the coming days. So I'm afraid there currently is no concrete plan because there is very little information available yet. All I can tell you is that there will be a need for short-notice reboots to apply relevant fixes. I will post again when there is any useful information. Cheers, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting