spectre-meltdown-checker

The well-known spectre-meltdown check says that my Q9650 is not vulnerable to Meltdown or Spectre 1-3. It is vulnerable to variant 3a, 4, Fallout, Zombieload, and and both RIDLs. https://github.com/speed47/spectre-meltdown-checker

OpenBSD will disable all but the first thread on any Intel processor by default. I'm assuming that an Intel i5-3320M (2 cores 4 threads) is too old to have microcode updates addressing the Spectre exploits (Meltdown, Foreshadow, Fallout, Zombieload, RIDL etc.), and disabling SMT/HT might be the most secure thing to do by default. This script produces a good assessment of Spectre problems for a wide variety of CPUs. I know that they are difficult to exploit, and the mitigations are disabled by many because of their performance impact. https://github.com/speed47/spectre-meltdown-checker

> - To what extend is this fixed by the mitigations which the kernel provides [0] for the Intel bugs? What do I have to add to my kernel command line? You can test your (linux/bsd) system with the following: https://github.com/speed47/spectre-meltdown-checker A shell script to tell if your system is vulnerable against the several "speculative execution" CVEs that were made public since 2018.

I find exceptionally difficult to write anything but trivial shell scripts without bugs. This one took years, and I suspect #bash could still find a bug: https://github.com/jakeogh/commandlock On the other hand, this is amazing: https://github.com/speed47/spectre-meltdown-checker

Is https://github.com/speed47/spectre-meltdown-checker the best tool? Impressive chunk of sh.

I am not sure of that: https://github.com/speed47/spectre-meltdown-checker#quick-su... seems to say that software mitigation exists for all three variants.