Spectre & Meltdown

[James B DiGriz]

On Fri, 5 Jan 2018 11:18:53 -0800
Rick Bensene via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

 Of course, update your OS as soon as updates are available,
> as patches (which will likely slow your system down) are forthcoming
> from Microsoft and various Linux trees. 
> 

You want to test those updates before you apply them to remote
production VM's. The latest CentOS 6.9 kernel update
(2.6.32-696.18.7.el6 64-bit, which addresses meltdown) is broken on at
least some Xen PV platforms and fails to boot. See
https://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=14336. You can't even get into grub
from a remote console to select a working kernel. Well, you could set
"default x", in /etc/grub.conf, where x = working kernel, before you
update. Hindsight being 20/20.

jbdigriz