!!! UPDATE !!! - 8 New Intel CPU Vulnerabilities found - called spectre next generation
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If you want to be save and do not want to take care of all this desaster - use specially for small enterprises and privat use machines, who are not effected - EspressoBin and Pine Rock64 - the price of the Rock64 went down recently and Armbian has the perfect images for them - https://www.armbian.com/
more infos down in the old text
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If you don't know, what is Meltdown and Spectre, please read the following link carefully!
This means, that your PC running any version of SliTaz is probably affected and in potential danger - a list of cpus, who are not affected you find here: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/computers-unaffected-meltdown-spectre/
What can I do?
MOST IMPORTANT - use always the latest browser - I recommend Firefox with add-on uBlock Origin - also the add-on NoScript is helpful, but it ships now with a list of whitelisted (trusted) domains. You cannot remove these anymore, but you can change the state of them. So, setting them all to default will do the trick, but it would obviously be better if you could just throw these out instead - so just use it, when you know, what you do.
1) against Meltdown - at the moment most dangerous
only Intel CPUs are affected: Use the latest 64bit ISO - or update the kernel - "uname -r" tells you the kernel - and it should be 3.2.98
http://mirror.slitaz.org/iso/rolling/slitaz-rolling-core64.iso
If you are running a 32bit version of rolling, you can update the kernel to 64bit without any problems, when your CPU is a 64bit CPU.
A 32bit kernel update is in preparation - initial patches have been posted to the kernel mailing lists, but it will be probably just in kernel 4.14 only - so I think only available in future SliTaz next version.
2) against Spectre - more complicated
Until now no solution - this will be a future mix between hardware and software updates - BIOS updates (please always use the newest BIOS / UEFI firmware for your mainboard or laptop) and microcode installs.
Until now SliTaz does not support early micrcode loading, but Aleksej and Pascale are working on it.
And I think, it will be ready until Intel will fix its patches - Intel urges halt to installing its Meltdown/Spectre patches from January whithout any new release date - alls updateds are "TBD" (to be determined)
The problem here is, that Intel patches until now only CPUs newer than 2013 - this means, that probably all older Intel CPUs will never get save again - I think, that this is important to know for all users of SliTaz, who often use older machines.....
SliTaz offers with frugal installation - http://doc.slitaz.org/en:guides:frugal - and tazusb a very good answer against attacks. every reboot your SliTaz is the same as on the day of your 1. boot, and when you regulary backup your /home partition, its very easy to restore everything. I had quite a lot of attacks on my audio-monuments, I run with SliTaz - just reboot and finished.
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But there are new CPUs, which are not affected from this F*CK, like Linus said - http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1801.2/04628.html
ARM A7 and A53 CPUs
You can't use them with SliTaz - sad but true, because SliTaz would be perfect, but all of them, you can use with armbian and Arch Linux ARM. There are phones, tablets, mainboards and small entire computers. The side effect of this ARM-devices is, that they are - compared to any older computers on the non affected list - very efficiant - most of them consume max. 6W - especially important, when you run them 24 hours every day.
What I recommand is, that you look, that your device has kernel mainline support - this means, that you are not stuck in any unsupported propriatary kernel line - you find on https://www.armbian.com/download/ a button mainline - I just give you a short list of the most interesting - all mainline:
For small Servers, own clouds, simple nas.....
1) Banana Pi M1 / Pro with a real SATA connection ~ 35€ / 45€
2) Pine ROCK64 or Libre-Board Renegade - both USB-3.0 and up to 4 GB RAM ~ 80$ (also OK as full PC) https://www.loverpi.com/collections/libre-computer-project
3) Marvells EspressoBin - USB-3.0 + real SATA + 2 GB Ram + 3x Gb LAN ~ 49$ on amazon.com - they sell now worldwide (new for me I just ordered one)
on the Banana use PostgeSQL not mysql or mariadb, then its quite ok and Libre tells, that Rengarde has real USB 3.0, but until now, no reviews, but it should be the same as the Rock64 (5 x quicker read/writes than the Banana) and the EspressoBin seems to have extreme good reads/writes (https://www.facebook.com/espressobin/posts/714014152128892)
Nextcloud has a ready image for the banana: https://www.simplenas.com/download/nextcloud
You will find also other boards with SATA, but most of them are connected through USB 2.0 - so this is not interesting.
Small PC for everyday work - mails, videos, presentaions, calcualtions........
There are a lot of Android TV Boxes with Armlogic 905 (4 cores) /912 (8 cores) CPUs - they differ quite a lot in the built quality (cooling, eMMC...)
Best choice would be MiniX Neo U9-H or U1 or I have a Beelink GT1 Ultimate, which is not bad built and has more RAM and ROM -
How to run Linux on them: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/2138-armbian-for-amlogic-s912/
infos about mainlain support: https://www.cnx-software.com/2018/01/24/mainline-linux-on-amlogic-s905-s905x-s912-soc-2018-status-update/
For low budget and if you dont need good lan, I recommand the Libre-Board-Le Potato - ~35$ - it has only Mbit Lan, but it supports high speed sd-cards with 70 MB/s for reading and writing - thats normally the bottleneck, if there is no eMMC unit.
Here is a review with specs: https://androidpctv.com/review-beelink-a1/ of the Android TV Boxes the Beelink A1 is quite new and it has USB 3.0, but no infos about linux until now, but the same cpu as the Libre-Board Renegade and the most interesting is the Zido H6 Pro with Allwinner H6 CPU - this little thing has very good benchmark - and USB 3.0 and PCIe 2.0, but mainline kernel just started - https://lwn.net/Articles/743378/ - http://linux-sunxi.org/H6
lets hope for a nice board with good passive cooler and the possibility to plug in a Crest 4-port SATA III PCIe 2.0 x2 Controller.
Tablets with Mediatek MT8163 CPUs
BQ Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition - so Linux is working on this tablets and it should work on Archos Oxygen Tablets - still available.
I WILL UPDATE THIS POST, AS THERE ARE NEW INFO
and please correct me if there is something wrong
EDIT: updated 25.01. / 26.1. / 13.6.
