Looking At The New "Critical" Security Firmware Update Hitting Systems - Delivers New Intel Microcode

[onlyLinuxLuvUBack]

The Dell XPS 9310 is the most crashy piece of hardware ...

you didn't know XPS meant Xtra Piece of Sheetz

[F.Ultra]

Too bad Asus, Gigabyte and MSI are not on board LVFS. I want UEFI updates for consumer-grade PC desktop motherboards.

SiFive isn't on board either, so no firmware updates for RISC-V.

Atleast with ASUS you can download the firmware on Linux and put it on /boot/efi/ and update from UEFI so there is no need to go via DOS or WIndows. Just wished that firmware makers would some day discover "keep my settings", now that would be nice (looking at you supermicro)!

[pal666]

Darn, Coreboot looks more and more welcoming over time.

no coreboot support for relevant motherboards either

[stormcrow]

In my case a Dell G5 5587 I5-8300H there's a CPU microcode update accompanied by an IME version change. Dell doesn't specify what any of it's for beyond being a "Urgent" update. It's possibly coincidental, but I wouldn't lay any money on it. This may be yet another cockup with IME that also affects the CPU. Or it could be multiple separate problems in the CPU and IME. Or they may need to update the IME simply because it's a CPU microcode update that affects talking to the IME somehow and the IME is only peripherally affected.

I don't have any other modern Intel based systems to compare against.

F.Ultra That's why I won't use motherboard based RAID systems. There's always a risk of losing the RAID array during a firmware update.

[uid313]

Atleast with ASUS you can download the firmware on Linux and put it on /boot/efi/ and update from UEFI so there is no need to go via DOS or WIndows. Just wished that firmware makers would some day discover "keep my settings", now that would be nice (looking at you supermicro)!

Yeah, but then I have to go to their website and check if there are new updates.
LVFS would be so amazing.

[F.Ultra]

Yeah, but then I have to go to their website and check if there are new updates.
LVFS would be so amazing.

Fully agreed!

[mangeek]

Interesting. I was hunting for clues myself, and thought the 'big problem' was likely going to be UEFI-related. I definitely saw a few updates where the thing that changed was UEFI or Intel ME related: https://downloadmirror.intel.com/713...leaseNotes.pdf