| Title | Breaking News: Intel Says you SHOULD NOT Install its Meltdown Firmware Fixes | |
| Date | Monday January 22 2018, @09:27PM | |
| Author | cmn32480 | |
| Topic | ||
| from the damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don't dept. | ||
Computerworld has just posted a story warning that you should immediately hold off installing any of Intel's Meltdown/Spectre microcode fixes.
From Belay That Order: Intel Says you Should NOT Install its Meltdown Firmware Fixes:
The warning, which encompasses just about every Intel processor out there, from all PC manufacturers, takes effect immediately. And there's no indication when it will get fixed.
You know how you're supposed to flash the BIOS or update the UEFI on all of your Intel machines, to guard against Meltdown/Spectre? Well, belay that order, private! Intel just announced that you need to hold off on all of its new patches. No, you can't uninstall them. To use the technical term, if you ran out and applied your Intel PC's latest firmware patch, you're hosed.
In what appears to be a catastrophic curtain call to the "oops" moment that I discussed ten days ago, it now seems that the bright, new firmware versions — which Intel has had six months to patch — have a nasty habit of causing "higher system reboots."
According to executive vice president Navin Shenoy, on the Intel Newsroom site, the current advice is:
We recommend that OEMs, cloud service providers, system manufacturers, software vendors and end users stop deployment of current versions, as they may introduce higher than expected reboots and other unpredictable system behavior.
And that covers just about everybody in the sentient non-ARM universe.
While the affected products site[*] doesn't list individual chips, the breadth of the recall is breathtaking — second-, third-, fourth-, fifth-, sixth-, seventh- and eighth-generation Core processors, Xeon, Atom, and lesser Core i3, i5 and i7 processors — they're all in the bin.
From Intel Root Cause of Reboot Issue Identified; Updated Guidance for Customers and Partners:
As we start the week, I want to provide an update on the reboot issues we reported Jan. 11. We have now identified the root cause for Broadwell and Haswell platforms, and made good progress in developing a solution to address it. Over the weekend, we began rolling out an early version of the updated solution to industry partners for testing, and we will make a final release available once that testing has been completed.
Based on this, we are updating our guidance for customers and partners:
- We recommend that OEMs, cloud service providers, system manufacturers, software vendors and end users stop deployment of current versions, as they may introduce higher than expected reboots and other unpredictable system behavior. For the full list of platforms, see the Intel.com Security Center site.
- We ask that our industry partners focus efforts on testing early versions of the updated solution so we can accelerate its release. We expect to share more details on timing later this week.
- We continue to urge all customers to vigilantly maintain security best practice and for consumers to keep systems up-to-date.
[*] Intel's updated security advisory lists the affected processors:
The following Intel-based platforms are impacted by this issue. Intel may modify this list at a later time. Please check with your system vendor or equipment manufacturer for more information regarding updates for your system.
| Links |
printed from SoylentNews, Breaking News: Intel Says you SHOULD NOT Install its Meltdown Firmware Fixes on 2023-07-19 23:28:03