Canonical makes Meltdown patches available – update –

Canonical has released patches in response to the Meltdown and Specter leaks. There will be no patch for Ubuntu 17.04, as this version will reach “end of life” status on January 13. There is an update path through version 17.10.

Canonical has made updates available for Ubuntu versions 16.04 lts, ​​17.10 and the hwe and lts versions from 14.04. It is not possible to apply the Meltdown patch via live patching, requiring a reboot. In addition, Ubuntu patches for Nvidia drivers have also been made available. Ubuntu isn’t the only distribution to come out with updates recently; these can also be found for Tails in the form of version 3.4. An online overview of patches can be found, which is maintained by Hanno Böck. Intel has released CPU microcode.

Nvidia released patches for Linux and Windows earlier this week. For Windows users with a GeForce, Quadro or NVS GPU, the patches are part of driver versions 390.65 and 386.07, which can be downloaded from the Nvidia site. The Linux patches are found in versions 390.12 and 384.111. Other affected manufacturer’s products fall into the Tesla and Grid categories.

Update, January 11: As tweaker Yggdrasil points out, this release only deals with the Meltdown patches. Mitigations for Specter will follow later.