It’s not called super root, it’s called kernel mode, and you could conceivably use these vulns to break out of a cloud container or even a paravirtualized VM.
Paralleling this with Thompson’s work is however senseless. These bugs are a well understood consequence of shaving everything that can be shaved for performance.
Furthermore, the compiler-to-compiler backdoor was only a thought exercise. We now have at least two independant free C compilers, countless proprietary ones, symbolic execution of binaries… making this undetectable would require a level of sophistication far superior to what known APT groups are doing.
