Re: Red Hat on AIX virtualization
AIX is POWER only (the short-lived AIX-5L port to Itanium has long since disappeared, and AIX/PS2 is a dead product).
AFAIK, nobody has demonstrated that AIX is vulnerable to MELTDOWN (indeed, it relies on virtually the whole kernel memory space being mapped into the address space of user-processes, although it is protected by memory access controls, and AIX does not have that mapping).
I'm guessing, but I think that the Power Linux distributions are removing the mapping of the kernel memory from the user process address space because this is actually a very sensible precaution (Linus has a lot to answer for, UNIX systems on other architectures like PDP-11, VAX, s370 et. al. never mapped kernel memory into user process's address space, so him doing it for Linux was rather short sighted - although early x86 processors were a bit deficient on the MMU front).
SPECTRE is a different beast. I would not be surprised to see some elements of SPECTRE affecting Power processors.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
