I can't shake the feeling that Intel are trying to take credit for retpoline. They make no effort to credit the folk at Google who came up with retpoline. You have to follow the reference in section 8 to infer that Google are the saviours here.
That definitely was not the intent! Getting retpoline to the place it is today took a ton of work from a ton of people, including the awesome folks at Google like Paul Turner, and countless people in the Linux community.
> In response to issues identified by external researchers, Intel has performed an in-depth comprehensive security review of its Intel® Management Engine (ME), Intel® Trusted Execution Engine (TXE), and Intel® Server Platform Services (SPS) with the objective of enhancing firmware resilience.
As a result, Intel has identified several security vulnerabilities that could potentially place impacted platforms at risk. Systems using ME Firmware versions 6.x/7.x/8.x/9.x/10.x//11.0/11.5/11.6/11.7/11.10/11.20, SPS Firmware version 4.0, and TXE version 3.0 are impacted.
https://security-center.intel.com/advisory.aspx?intelid=INTE...
And pretty much all of Intel's press releases surrounding Meltdown and Spectre have been almost as misleading, too, one way or another.
[iwork@google]