On Wed, Jun 27, 2018 at 1:51 AM Bill Kenworthy <bi...@iinet.net.au> wrote: > > I think its more complex than just falling behind - anything later gets > the spectre fixes etc. and it appears not to be quite stable yet in some > cases.
This may have been your intent and I might be misreading your email, but I just wanted to make it clear that recent longterm kernels should have spectre fixes. Now, the OP's 4.9.16 obviously won't have those, but that isn't the current Gentoo stable release. The current Gentoo stable appears to be 4.9.95, which is from April, so I imagine it wouldn't have fixes for the latest spectre variant, assuming it is vulnerable. Well, that is unless it has been backported - I'm too lazy to go look at the patches. I'm sure the ~arch gentoo-sources has them at 4.9.109, but again I didn't check upstream logs. The main reason I use upstream kernels is because between previous messing around with btrfs and current use of zfs I'm a bit sensitive to what kernel I'm on and my needs aren't entirely aligned with the goals of the Gentoo kernel team. That isn't an indictment on them - the nature of a distro is to cater to the typical user, and when you're not a typical user you have to know when to deviate. The ability to do this is one of Gentoo's selling points, but when you do you're a bit on your own. -- Rich
