Re: Date/Time?

[Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>]

On Mon, 21 May 2018, speck for Greg KH wrote:
> On Sun, May 20, 2018 at 04:59:04PM -0400, speck for Jon Masters wrote:
> > * ARM. They have a new SMCC (Secure Monitor Call) interface (similar to
> > the one they did for branch predictor invalidation for Spectre-v2) that
> > will be wired up with kernel patches. Each of the vendors will implement
> > the new SMCC in ATF (Arm Trusted Firmware) on their parts, using the
> > best back-end mitigation (similar to microcode). Arm know to ping Thomas
> > with those patches, yet this has not happened yet (to my knowledge), nor
> > to Greg. Will has point on this in any case. He and the team are working
> > hard on this. Still, I am saddened by these patches not being available
> > prior to disclosure since this is not how we do things in the server
> > space. But in anticipation that this would happen, I worked directly
> > with Cavium (the only server-class CPU vendor with production RHEL
> > support for which we need an answer tomorrow on our end) to create a
> > firmware knob that can be used in the short term until this is fixed. I
> > also have pinged all of the Arm server vendors to let them know I expect
> > all of the SMCC wiring to be in place within the next few weeks.
> 
> Just heard from ARM, they are going to wait a week or so and then send
> patches for inclusion in 4.18 and then send some backports for the older
> kernels then.  The kernel patches are useless without firmware updates
> and I don't know what the state of them are.
> 
> They also complained that they can not finalize their patches as they do
> not know what we agreed on for the prctl() interface.  Which sucks as
> that was hashed out here weeks ago.

That's odd as I gave them access to the patches on May 9th...
 
Thanks,

	tglx