Gold Linker Patch: Introduce the "retpoline" x86 mitigation technique for variant #2 of the speculative execution vulnerabilities disclosed today, specifically identified by CVE-2017-5715 and in some places called "spectre".

[Nick Clifton]

Hi Sri,

> Patch attached for the gold linker.

Did I miss something, or has this patch only been submitted for the gold linker
and not the bfd linker ?


>> This "retpoline" mitigation is fully described in the following blog post:
>> https://support.google.com/faqs/answer/7625886

I think that it might be useful to include this link in the documentation
for the -z retpolineplt option.


It occurs to me that it might also be useful to be able to mark a binary
as having been linked with this option, so that the loader (or a static
tool) can check, and if desired, reject a binary as being insecure.

Cheers
  Nick