Debian Warns Of Hyper Threading Issue With Intel Sky/Kaby Lake CPUs

[starshipeleven]

I bet you could set those options on at least some motherboards using UEFI flags, which you can do while booted.

When you find one of such mythical boards please give me a shout, on most stuff I've seen the only thing you can do is change boot options from withing a booted system.

HP firmwares allow to be changed from within windows (don't know about linux), but you still need to reboot.

EDIT: the HP thing allows quite a bit of practical jokes like changing boot order to block booting, disable keyboard/touchpad and adding BIOS passwords. You just need to run a script controlling the tool as admin.

[aufkrawall]

I bet you could set those options on at least some motherboards using UEFI flags, which you can do while booted. Have to reboot to apply it though.

Do we want Linux distributions to alter Uefi configuration?

[TumultuousUnicorn]

Nope not Debian only, it can affects any out of date OS it seems:

Seems better for me.

[garegin]

Does windows get microcode updates through windows update?
I'm not a big fan of software patches and favor fixing it through firmware updates.

[dungeon]

Seems better for me.

I only count years, since SKL is about 2 years old by now and it still needs bios/firmware fixes like this is interesting to me

[MaxToTheMax]

Do we want Linux distributions to alter Uefi configuration?

They already do. Distros can and do change the boot order at install time to put themselves first (i.e. changing the UEFI boot order to favor whatever drive has GRUB on it,) and some distros have a "reboot into Windows" button that temporarily changes the boot order for the next boot. These are all useful and beneficial features.

[MaxToTheMax]

However, giving it some extra thought, the argument that it's preferable in this particular case is not convincing. Your CPU is using microcode no matter what, so so if you install the intel-microcode package, you're not causing any additional non-free software to be used. You're just replacing one blob with another blob.

[Chewi]

Heh, good to know that it's not just Ryzen that misbehaves these days.

[torsionbar28]

Heh, good to know that it's not just Ryzen that misbehaves these days.

intel regularly releases new microcode for their cpu's. over the years intel has had a lot more misbehaving silicon than amd.

Haswell & Broadwell:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8376/i...eep-broadwelly

Core2:
https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer...ore-cpu-errata

Another Skylake bug a year ago:
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2016/01/11/intel-skylake-crash-erratum/1/

[Ronshere]

I thought this was fixed last fall, or is this a new bug?