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Comment by mrunseen | Hacker News Reader

whats wrong about it? im gonna buy new laptop and it will be intel powered (dont kill me noob at intel cpus)

I'm not sure I'm following you, but I'm saying they're releasing a fix, as if that really deals with the problem. How many people are actually going to install the fix? How many people out there even know about these issues?

Going forward there need to be easy ways to update all of this stuff. These flaws won't stop coming out. It would be great if they got installed with OS updates, but I can understand if there's a security problem there.

Microcode updates are distributed as OS updates.

Maybe I'm using big words I don't understand. What is it that Lenovo and such are distributing as part of this? I know they're labeled as BIOS updates but I assumed it's more than that since the BIOS is a different component.

EDIT: So looking into it, it seems that CPU microcode is indeed the firmware, and I presume that the firmware is where a fix such as the one released here would be.

Somebody mentioned a Lenovo update elsewhere in comments. The recent ME updates required an update from Lenovo. I assumed the same would apply here but thankfully not. I wonder why the OS can't update ME firmware the same way.

Updated processor microcode has to be loaded to the processor on every boot, and this can be done either by the system BIOS/firmware or by the OS (or both).

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