Coming a week after the seventh RC, Linux kernel 4.15 Release Candidate 8 is here with more patches against the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities publicly disclosed earlier this month. Most specifically, it brings x86 “retpoline” support, a solution developed by Google and other security researchers to not allow speculation on the CPU. Besides retpoline support, Linux kernel 4.15 RC8 isn’t a major patch, as it only includes various smaller updates to the RISC-V and PowerPC (PPC) hardware architectures, updated GPU, USB, NVMe, networking, and sound drivers, core networking improvements, some tooling updates like the new x86 selftests, as well as minor crypto, AppArmor, and documentation changes.