Spectre V1 mitigations in the Linux kernel are coming for RISC-V with newer RISC-V core designs being vulnerable to Spectre Variant One style attacks.

Spectre V1 as a reminder is the variant for Bounds Check Bypass with CPU speculative execution in conditional branches. The Linux kernel RISC-V code hasn’t seen Spectre V1 protections since earlier more basic RISC-V core designs have been immune to Variant One and other Spectre vulnerabilities. But newer more complex RISC-V core designs are bringing some of the same challenges exhibited on x86_64 and AArch64 architectures.