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Microsoft Resumes Meltdown and Spectre Updates for AMD Devices (bleepingcomputer.com)
Microsoft has resumed the rollout of security updates for AMD devices. The updates patch the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. From a report: Microsoft released these patches on January 3, but the company stopped the rollout for AMD-based computers on January 9 after users reported crashes that plunged PCs into unbootable states. After working on smoothing out the problems with AMD, Microsoft announced today it would resume the rollout of five (out of nine) security updates.
So is the title flamebait, as is usual for our new Slashdot overlords?
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Spectre is pretty much anything with a modern chip, including Intel, AMD, and ARM. Some of the few exemptions were processors that don't do speculative/out-of-order execution. The only more recent hardware I've seen that's immune are the Raspberry Pi (in-order-execution) and some ARM hardware such as various Snapdragon or Cortex-A53/55. Some of the older Atom stuff is also safe because it doesn't do OOE, but Spectre will hit the majority of the rest.
Meltdown was quite certainly an Intel thing according all legit sources. It seem part of Intel's PR machine that somehow managed to group the two together even though they're quite separate vulnerabilities with quite different risk and effect factors.
I have all of my computers (all with AMD and all with Windows 7) set up to tell me about updates but let me decide which ones and when to install them.
If they had been set up to automatically update, at least one, or all of them, would have been stuck by now. I can't imagine the fear of living with Windows 10, never knowing when the next automatic update will brick your computer. Or being right in the middle of something important, like work, and having the computer decide that this would be a nice time to update. No, thank you, Microsoft.
So far I haven't seen the new update listed. I think I'll still let other users go first before I risk it.
What should they do? These machines are already in a stable state.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The 2 Specter variants are just theoretical. It is just Intel FUD.To distract he public from what a nightmare Meltdown truly is to Intel.
My understanding is that AMD is theroretically vulnerable to hard to mitigate spectre (version 2?), But the proof of concept didn't work on it and AMD says it's super improbable. Certainly that warrents mitigation though.
Other Spectre easy to fix is easy to fix (version 1?).
And AMD is immune to meltdown.
Please correct me where I'm wrong, there's a lot of FUD and also a lot of super "AMD is immune" nonsense.
As it is, there is no proof of concept for hard to fix spectre on AMD.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg