Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Gets Compiler-Based Retpoline Kernel Mitigation for Spectre V2

On January 23, 2018, Canonical updated the kernel packages of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) to version linux-image 3.13.0-141.190, patching the Spectre Variant 2 security vulnerability discovered by Jann Horn, for the 64-bit (amd64) hardware architecture. The Spectre flaw can be exploited by a local attacker to expose sensitive information from kernel memory on modern microprocessors with branch prediction and speculative execution capabilities. Canonical now added support for 32-bit hardware architectures as well for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS systems.