Since the discovery of Spectre and Meltdown bugs, security researchers have uncovered a whole load of other hardware bugs including MDS, L1TF, LazyFP, Fallout, ZombieLoad and more. These bugs, if left unpatched, can expose sensitive data between applications and cause huge security implications.
Some bugs have been patched by renewed hardware (CPU) generations, while others can only be patched with software (microcode & kernel) updates. Fundamentally, the more bugs your hardware has, the slower it operates due to the overhead. It's therefore very important to ensure you are aware of the bugs your hardware is subject to so that you can understand and predict any slowdowns that you might be subject to.
First, let's download a script to check:
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/speed47/spectre-meltdown-checker/master/spectre-meltdown-checker.sh
Next, let's run the script:
sudo sh spectre-meltdown-checker.sh
This will show you a list of bugs that the script is aware of, then if and how these bugs are patched on your system. In general, the more bugs you see patched by hardware rather than microcode or kernel, the faster your system will operate.
