January 24, 2018

Don’t Install Intel’s Latest Meltdown & Spectre Patches

The industry has been struggling to fix the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities which were revealed at the beginning of this year. Though the fixes for Meltdown are straightforward, the mitigation measures for Spectre has been particularly challenging.

meltdown-spectre

Although the patches could fix these bugs, it may slow down the systems. Recently, we have seen Microsoft blocking the security updates due to compatibility issues it found with a small number of antivirus software products. Well, the scenario is worse for Intel.

The primary focus has shifted to Intel after knowing that all of its chips that were manufactured in the past 10 years were affected by Meltdown and Spectre. Apparently, many users have reported system reboot issues after installing the updates. To mitigate the problem temporarily, Intel advised the users not to install the security patches until they address the issue with a suitable solution.

“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,” wrote Intel’s executive VP Navin Shenoy.

Shenoy also mentioned that they have found the root cause for the Broadwell and Haswell platforms and the company has already started rolling out the early version of the updated solution over the weekend to its OEM partners for testing. Based on the testing, the final version of the update will be released.

However, Intel’s patches got serious criticism from Linux creator Linus Torvalds when he publicly wrote, “All of this is pure garbage”. “The patches are COMPLETE AND UTTER GARBAGE. … They do things that do not make sense.”

About the author 

Meghna


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