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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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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.
The real thing is: can you update the microcode of older CPUs? If not then it's a marketing strategy.
It sounds like the criterion is "is newer microcode available". So it doesn't look like a marketing strategy to sell new CPUs.
I mean, it’s still good to know if you’re vulnerable right (for sake of discussion)?
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.
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Sounds like that would be outdated for everyone without a rolling distro.
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.
Stable distros can and will backport security fixes. Good ones that is.
So the patch is just copying the existing warning to a standard location?
How does it know if the microcode is outdated?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.
Debian-based distros (and probably most othera as well) actually have a package called "intel-microcode" which gets updated fairly regularly.
@DaPorkchop_ Oddly, if you build your own kernel and remove the system provided one, the package gets automatically removed as well which is weird, because it is really still needed regardless.
There's probably an efivar that reads the current microcode version.
If that's the case, why wouldn't they put the microcode in the kernel?
@ryannathans Why bloat the kernel with the microcode for every intel processor that might need it (and there is a similar thing for AMD) when you don't have that specific processor? It does make more sense for it to be a separate, especially on memory constrained systems. I mean if you've got 256GB of RAM probably not a big deal but if you've got 256MB a big deal.
The kernel compilation is already configurable between megabytes and gigabyte+
Distros pick their featureset