On Tue, Jan 23, 2018 at 10:49 AM, Ralf Corsepius <rc040203@freenet.de> wrote:
Hi,

Recent Fedora kernels report

# cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep bugs
bugs            : cpu_meltdown spectre_v1 spectre_v2

on my PIII and my N270s (I.e. all i386ers, I have).

To my knowledge, this is entirely bogus.


Bug filed: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1537625

I have some bad news for you, it isn't as bogus as it seems. Noted in the bug.  For more information see  https://meltdownattack.com/ particularly:

"Desktop, Laptop, and Cloud computers may be affected by Meltdown. More technically, every Intel processor which implements out-of-order execution is potentially affected, which is effectively every processor since 1995 (except Intel Itanium and Intel Atom before 2013). We successfully tested Meltdown on Intel processor generations released as early as 2011. Currently, we have only verified Meltdown on Intel processors. At the moment, it is unclear whether AMD processors are also affected by Meltdown.  According to ARM, some of their processors are also affected."

and 

"Almost every system is affected by Spectre: Desktops, Laptops, Cloud Servers, as well as Smartphones. More specifically, all modern processors capable of keeping many instructions in flight are potentially vulnerable. In particular, we have verified Spectre on Intel, AMD, and ARM processors."

The feature which enables these attacks is out of order execution. Your atom doesn't have it, your PIII does.

Justin