The Chinese mantra “time can tell” looks like a witness to modern hardware and software development industry. As we know IBM mainframe (s390) and Sun SPARC given the feeling to the world in last decase was that they are far away from modern technologies. Even though S390 contains LPAR function allow multuple OS platform operation includes Windows server , linux and 3rd party unix run in their box. The general comments feedback from IT world was that they are outdated. A rumours were true and Oracle laid off the core talent of the Solaris and SPARC teams last year. As a matter of fact, protect the IT world not only Cyber security services provider. (For example, the defense solution vendor headache because they do not have precise idea how to detect and defense such design limitation problem). In future may be the former giant will give you an assistance to you. Why?It was because SPARC and S390 support “Address Space Identifiers” (ASIs). In the sense that they did the Kernel page-table isolation already. They are not vulnerable to “meltdown and “Spectre” vulnerabilities.

Remark:

SPARC v8 privileged instructions shown as below:

• user mode instruction fetch is ASI 0x08,
• supervisor mode instruction fetch is ASI 0x09
• user mode normal data access is ASI 0x0A
• supervisor mode normal data access is ASI 0x0B