Jon Masters

Recently disclosed vulnerabilities against modern high performance computer microarchitectures known as 'Meltdown' and 'Spectre' are among an emerging wave of hardware-focused attacks. These include cache side-channel exploits against underlying shared resources, which arise as a result of common industry-wide performance optimizations.

More broadly, attacks against hardware are entering a new phase of sophistication that will see more in the months ahead. This talk will describe several of these attacks, how they can be mitigated, and generally what we can do as an industry to bring performance without trading security.

This talk introduces the Fedora ARM Project and in particular the work we are doing to bring Fedora to emerging 64-bit ARM server systems.

Fedora is a popular Linux distribution on desktop and server-class systems. The Fedora ARM Project brings Fedora to ARM-powered systems - both existing 32-bit and emerging 64-bit. We are presently engaged in a full bootstrap effort to the new 64-bit architecture. This talk will include a live demonstration of Fedora running on 64-bit ARM hardware along with a detailed description of the process of bootstrapping a general purpose Linux distribution from scratch.