The real thing is: can you update the microcode of older CPUs? If not then it’s a marketing strategy.
I mean, it’s still good to know if you’re vulnerable right (for sake of discussion)?
It sounds like the criterion is “is newer microcode available”. So it doesn’t look like a marketing strategy to sell new CPUs.
@GolfNovemberUniform @captainkangaroo Yes and Linux includes software to do this.
The article does specify that it would report if the newest version of the firmware for the CPU family is not installed, so it doesn’t seem like this is that particular kind of BS.
Microcode would not be a concern with that particular CPU.
How about a Linux Patch that reports binary blobs wirh no source AS __ Security Vulnerabilities __
Or are we not allowed to criticize the back doors that hackers gain access to.
Your brain isn’t open source. You’re a security vulnerability
Don’t let your dreams be dreams.
How does it know if the microcode is outdated?
@ryannathans @captainkangaroo I’m going to make the wild assumption that the kernel will have a table of the current microcode versions at the time of it’s release, but I doubt that
will get updated except by kernel upgrades.There’s probably an efivar that reads the current microcode version.
Debian-based distros (and probably most othera as well) actually have a package called “intel-microcode” which gets updated fairly regularly.
The Linux kernel would maintain a list of the latest Intel microcode versions for each CPU family, which is based on the data from the Intel microcode GitHub repository. In turn this list would need to be kept updated with new Linux kernel releases and as Intel pushes out new CPU microcode files.
Sounds like that would be outdated for everyone without a rolling distro.
Stable distros can and will backport security fixes. Good ones that is.
Sounds like a user space application, there’s no place for this in the kernel. So would you need to upgrade kennel and reboot to update the list? Nonsense.
Yeah, methinks this will be one of those alerts pretty much everyone will be like “yeah, yeah, I know” and click to silence those notifications.
