[elrepo] Announcement: EL7 New kernel-ml Release [4.15.0-1]

[Phil Perry]

On 04/02/18 21:15, David Ranch wrote:
> 
> Hello Everyone,
> 
> I have a question about this statement:
> 
> 
>> Kernel-ml has the retpoline patches but at present RHEL does not have 
>> a retpoline-aware compiler. The upstream kernel code (kernel.org) does 
>> not currently contain the IBRS patches that Red Hat have incorporated 
>> into the distro kernel.
> 
> Once a retpoline enabled compiler is available, will ONLY the kernel 
> need to be rebuilt with it or will *ALL* packages need to be recompiled 
> as well (from the Centos community, 3rd party packages, etc)?
> 

You would need to address that question to the providers of those 
packages, but I have not seen any mention of anything other than 
recompiling the kernel.

I note SUSE have recently announced they have backported retpoline 
patches to gcc-4.8 which is of the same vintage as that used in RHEL7, 
so it appears feasible if that is a path Red Hat wish to take:

https://news.opensuse.org/2018/01/26/opensuse-meltdown-spectre-update-26-jan-2018/