Introduction
2018 truly is starting off with a bang: fundamental CPU flaws dubbed Meltdown and Spectre were found affecting pretty much all modern processors developed since the Pentium Pro (1995). These flaws root in two critical CPU features: Out of Order Execution and Speculative Execution, which are crucial for performance. Since this is an important feature and not a bug, it is inherently hard to fix. Furthermore, for performance reasons, speculative execution is almost always implemented in hardware, so “fixes”…