Why some systems have "spectre_v2=retpoline" by default on commandline for freshly installed RHEL7.7 version?

Solution Verified - Updated -

Issue

  • Why some systems have "spectre_v2=retpoline" by default on commandline for freshly installed RHEL7.7 version?
# cat /proc/cmdline
BOOT_IMAGE=/vmlinuz-3.10.0-1160.76.1.el7.x86_64 root=/dev/mapper/rhel_dhcp130--172-root ro crashkernel=auto spectre_v2=retpoline rd.lvm.lv=rhel_dhcp130-172/root rd.lvm.lv=rhel_dhcp130-172/swap rhgb quiet LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.7 and above.
  • All the Intel cpu belonging to Skylake and KabyLake family.

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