To mitigate Spectre Variant 2, GCC needs to have retpoline
support (-mindirect-branch and -mfunction-return arguments on amd64
and i386).
Patches were pulled from H.J. Lu's backport branch to
4.9 (hjl/indirect/gcc-4_9-branch), available at
https://github.com/hjl-tools/gcc/tree/hjl/indirect/gcc-4_9-branch/master. Upstream
GCC does not apply patches to anything older than the
gcc-6-branch. H.J. Lu is the author of the upstream retpoline commits
as well.
Several Linux distributions already backported these patches to GCC 4
branches and some old kernels (3.13 for instance) have been recompiled
with these GCC patches. These kernels only allow to load kernel
modules that are compiled with the retpoline support.
References:
- Ubuntu bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gcc-4.8/+bug/1749261
- Ubuntu package: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gcc-4.8/4.8.4-2ubuntu1~14.04.4Fixes#38394
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