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Latest OVS 3.4.x updates - updated bios - Spectre/meltdown flaws still present ? (same h/w + rhel7/K

morgan coxApr 3 2018 — edited Apr 11 2018

Hi.

I have installed the latest bios for our servers - Hp Gen9/DL360, and installed the latest OVS updates (via yum), however when I run the meltdown/spectre checker it shows Variant2/3 still vulnerable...  Both on the hypervisor and VMs

On the same hardware with standard Rhel7, using KVM the script shows all 3 variants as fixed.

I am using the redhat script from -> https://access.redhat.com/security/vulnerabilities/speculativeexecution

i.e

# ./spectre-meltdown-180327_0.sh

This script is primarily designed to detect Spectre / Meltdown on supported

Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems and kernel packages.

Result may be inaccurate for other RPM based systems.

Detected CPU vendor: Intel

Running kernel: 4.1.12-112.14.15.el6uek.x86_64

Variant #1 (Spectre): Not affected

CVE-2017-5753 - speculative execution bounds-check bypass

   - Kernel with mitigation patches: OK

Variant #2 (Spectre): Vulnerable

CVE-2017-5715 - speculative execution branch target injection

   - Kernel with mitigation patches: OK

   - HW support / updated microcode: NO

   - IBRS: Not disabled on kernel commandline

   - IBPB: Not disabled on kernel commandline

   - Retpolines: Not disabled on kernel commandline

Variant #3 (Meltdown): Vulnerable

CVE-2017-5754 - speculative execution permission faults handling

   - Kernel with mitigation patches: OK

   - PTI: Not disabled on kernel commandline

Red Hat recommends that you:

* Ask your HW vendor for CPU microcode update.

Note about virtualization

In virtualized environment, there are more steps to mitigate the issue, including:

* Host needs to have updated kernel and CPU microcode

* Host needs to have updated virtualization software

* Guest needs to have updated kernel

* Hypervisor needs to propagate new CPU features correctly

For more details about mitigations in virtualized environment see:

https://access.redhat.com/articles/3331571

For more information about the vulnerabilities see:

https://access.redhat.com/security/vulnerabilities/speculativeexecution

However the exact same bios version on rhel7 shows as all 3 flaws as fixed, both on a KVM host and KVM VM

I also see this

# dmesg | grep 'Kernel/User page tables isolation'

[    0.000000] Kernel/User page tables isolation: disabled

Is this just an issue with the spectre checker script or is oracle VM still actually vulnerable and still needs kernel, etc updates ?

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