Canonical Releases Spectre Patches for Ubuntu Linux, Meltdown Fix for PowerPC

After pulling Intel’s microcode firmware update from the software repositories of Ubuntu 17.10, 16.04 LTS, and 14.04 LTS, Canonical now released the Spectre patches for all supported Ubuntu Linux releases, including all official flavors and those using HWE (Hardware Enablement) kernels, and Meltdown kernel patches for PowerPC (PPC64el) architectures. The new kernel patches address the Spectre security flaw (CVE-2017-5753, CVE-2017-5715) for the i386, amd64, PPC64el, and s390x architectures on Ubuntu 17.10 and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, including for Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS users using the Linux Hardware Enablement (HWE) kernel from Ubuntu 17.10 and Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS users using the HWE kernel from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.