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Discussion on: This is how Meltdown works

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mortoray profile image
edA‑qa mort‑ora‑y

I'm not sure I know much more than that tidbit about AMD. :D

I believe the Linux patch is something called Kernel Page Table Isolation, which isolates the kernel memory even more. In the fast food analogy I think that'd be like moving the kitchen to a different building, the customers can't see anything even if poking around

I'm presuming the affected code on Intel is hardware as they indicated they can't release a microcode patch for it. That would seem to imply that a lot of it is hardware, but there is updatable code also at play.

A saw an LLVM patch that could also help mitigate some of the issues, but the details weren't entirely clear: I don't know if this means something in user-land could help, or they are compiling kernel bits with this patch.

The exact details of all this are still a bit cloudy; full info release hasn't been made yet I believe.