Spectre and Meltdown Mitigations Now Available for FreeBSD and OpenBSD Systems

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More than a month since their public discloser the nasty Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerability have now been fixed for various BSD operating systems including FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

FreeBSD announced last month that it was made aware of the Spectre and Meltdown security vulnerabilities discovered by various researchers from Google's Project Zero, Graz University of Technology, Cyberus Technology, and others in late December 2017 to have time to fix them for their BSD-powered operating system.

The project said that they are working with CPU vendors like Intel and AMD to mitigate both Spectre and Meltdown on FreeBSD, but did not give an estimated time of the publication of the patches. One and a half months later, the patches to mitigate Meltdown via PTI (Page Table Isolation) arrived, along with PCID optimization of PTI.

Also, the FreeBSD project released a kernel update that includes the IBRS (Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation) feature to partially mitiga... (read more)

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