The headlong race to cover the Meltdown\/Spectre debacle<\/a> has claimed another victim. In a surprising move, Intel has raised a red flag about some of its firmware patches. What should you do? Wait.<\/p>\n
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Credit to Author: Woody Leonhard| Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2018 05:18:00 -0800<\/strong><\/p>\n The headlong race to cover the Meltdown\/Spectre debacle<\/a> has claimed another victim. In a surprising move, Intel has raised a red flag about some of its firmware patches. What should you do? Wait.<\/p>\n Yesterday, Intel executive VP Navin Shenoy <\/span>posted on the company blog<\/a>:<\/p>\n We have received reports from a few customers of higher system reboots after applying firmware updates. Specifically, these systems are running Intel Broadwell and Haswell CPUs for both client and data center. We are working quickly with these customers to understand, diagnose and address this reboot issue. If this requires a revised firmware update from Intel, we will distribute that update through the normal channels.<\/p>\n Shenoy went on to emphasize that Intel was working directly with its big customers \u2014 but that normal Intel customers \u201cshould continue to apply updates recommended by their system and operating system providers.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019m trying to look up the term condescending<\/em>, but never mind.<\/p>\n Robert McMillan at The Wall Street Journal <\/em>picked up on the story<\/a> late last night (paywall):<\/p>\n Intel is quietly advising some customers to hold off installing patches that address new security flaws affecting virtually all of its processors. It turns out the patches had bugs of their own.<\/p>\n Then Reuters got in on the act<\/a>:<\/p>\n Intel has identified three issues in updates released over the past week for \u201cmicrocode,\u201d or firmware, the [Wall Street Journal<\/em>] reported, citing a confidential document the company had shared with some customers that it had reviewed.<\/p>\n Intel\u2019s been riding out the Meltdown\/Spectre storm with some aplomb, publishing a performance hit table (see screenshot below) that says Skylake, Kaby Lake, and Coffee Lake processors (6th, 7th and 8th generation) take a 7 to 8 percent performance hit with the new Meltdown-free firmware.<\/p>\n There’s no mention in the official speedtest about the 2-year-old Broadwell chip.<\/p>\n Where does that leave \u201cnormal\u201d Windows users with 2016 or earlier processors? In a holding pattern. Again (pardon me if I sound like a broken record) there are NO Meltdown\/Spectre exploits in the wild (although one highly credible researcher, Alex Ionescu, claims he has a working proof of concept<\/a> for Windows \u2014 which he won\u2019t release for a few more weeks).<\/p>\n As for Microsoft Surface owners \u2014 Microsoft falling into the \u201crecommended by their system and operating system providers\u201d bucket mentioned by Intel \u2014 we don\u2019t know what\u2019s going to happen. Microsoft hasn\u2019t responded to Intel\u2019s admission. We don\u2019t know when (or if) it will update its Surface firmware patches.<\/p>\n All we know is that Microsoft has made no commitment<\/a> to providing a Meltdown\/Spectre patch for Surface Pro 2, Surface Pro (original), or Surface 3 (non-Pro) PCs.<\/p>\n Tell me again how many billions Microsoft has made from Surface?<\/p>\n Join us for sackcloth and ashes on the <\/em>AskWoody Forum<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n http:\/\/www.computerworld.com\/category\/security\/index.rss<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Credit to Author: Woody Leonhard| Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2018 05:18:00 -0800<\/strong><\/p>\n The headlong race to cover the Meltdown\/Spectre debacle<\/a> has claimed another victim. In a surprising move, Intel has raised a red flag about some of its firmware patches. What should you do? Wait.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n