Originally posted by Jumbotron
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So you had a choice. If you weren't running into the problem, you could choose not to update your BIOS, and if you were affected and wanted to do something to avoid triggering it, it was like a major processor downgrade.
You can read about the bugs that end up affecting AMD processors because they publish them in Erratum. They're really intended to document the problems for people like Linux kernel developers, so they fly under the radar usually, but there are a lot of them.
Like with Intel, most can be fixed, but only if you run newer firmware, which Debian won't include. So under Debian, you're basically running with the firmware that the BIOS loaded when the computer booted up, regardless of if it's broken and by how much.
Some of these bugs end up creating security vulnerabilities, so even if you run a fully patched Debian, without the firmware updates, you aren't getting the fixes applied to the firmware by the hardware vendor.
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