GCC and Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities

[Zan Lynx]

On January 4, 2018 8:10:14 PM MST, Eric Gallager <egall@gwmail.gwu.edu> wrote:
>Is there anything GCC could be doing at the compiler level to mitigate
>the recently-announced Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities? From
>reading about them, it seems like they involve speculative execution
>and indirect branch prediction, and those are the domain of things the
>compiler deals with, right? (For reference, Meltdown is CVE-2017-5754,
>and Spectre is CVE-2017-5753 and CVE-2017-5715)
>
>Just wondering,
>Eric

If you're allowing people to run untrustworthy machine code on your hardware there's nothing a compiler can do to help. You'd need to make them use your compiler, and why would they?

So anyone offering shell accounts or virtual machines is out of luck.