Friday, January 12th 2018
Intel Acknowledges: More BSODs Affecting "Haswell" and "Broadwell"
As Intel CEO Brian Krzanich emphasized in his Security-First Pledge, Intel is committed to transparency in reporting progress in handling the Google Project Zero exploits.
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. We are also working directly with data center customers to discuss the issue.
End-users should continue to apply updates recommended by their system and operating system providers.
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. We are also working directly with data center customers to discuss the issue.
End-users should continue to apply updates recommended by their system and operating system providers.
26 Comments on Intel Acknowledges: More BSODs Affecting "Haswell" and "Broadwell"
Do ancient computers also affected? everything works bad old bios, steam blue screening, old game engine, annoying windows.
Honestly, though. I think there should be legistlation that puts pressure on core hardware and critical software makers to react to such security issues beyond the EOL as long as they remain mainstream. Heck, even for a -reasonable- cost. That, or speed up the effing IP expiration and have them open source the effing things if they are not caring to maintain them anymore!
Here is the summary of what we have found so far:
With Windows 10 on newer silicon (2016-era PCs with Skylake, Kabylake or newer CPU), benchmarks show single-digit slowdowns, but we don’t expect most users to notice a change because these percentages are reflected in milliseconds.
With Windows 10 on older silicon (2015-era PCs with Haswell or older CPU), some benchmarks show more significant slowdowns, and we expect that some users will notice a decrease in system performance.
With Windows 8 and Windows 7 on older silicon (2015-era PCs with Haswell or older CPU), we expect most users to notice a decrease in system performance.
For context, on newer CPUs such as on Skylake and beyond, Intel has refined the instructions used to disable branch speculation to be more specific to indirect branches, reducing the overall performance penalty of the Spectre mitigation. Older versions of Windows have a larger performance impact because Windows 7 and Windows 8 have more user-kernel transitions because of legacy design decisions, such as all font rendering taking place in the kernel.
This info I found in cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2018/01/09/understanding-the-performance-impact-of-spectre-and-meltdown-mitigations-on-windows-systems/ kinda shows how Intel and Microsoft are in a programmed obsolescence patch, cause older CPUs and Windows will be more affected by the patch, from my point of view seems like a very convenient workaround for them.
This is a CPU issue. What are you talking about?
I do know it's only meltdow that affects Intel only CPUs, while spectre affects pretty much all vendors.
I wonder ...
usn.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-3523-1/
usn.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-3531-1/
wiki.ubuntu.com/SecurityTeam/KnowledgeBase/SpectreAndMeltdown