POWER8 firmware release notes for Spectre/Meltdown

download4.boulder.ibm.com

2 pointsnewman3142 comments

What's interesting is that I noticed that the firmware notes indicate that CVE-2017-5753 and CVE-2017-5754.

It's not clear to me if IBM is acknowledging that POWER is affected by Meltdown (thought to be mostly/only Intel so far) or if this is an error in their notes.

Meltdown being Intel-specific has been parroted a lot, but the primary sources say:

- The Meltdown paper speculated that the Meltdown class of Attack should/could work on AMD & ARM, even though they hadn't developed their PoC exploit for non-Intel CPUs

- ARM published a note saying some of their cores are vulnerable to Meltdown.

- AMD put out a press release saying AMD is only to Spectre, but there has been no technical/engineering explanation of the claim.

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