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Comment by boring_twenties | Hacker News Reader

When Intel released the microcode updates for the MDS family of vulnerabilities, in May 2019, they declined to support my Westmere Xeon, which launched in May 2010.

So, not quite 10 years. Still a hell of a lot better than Qualcomm, though.

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HP Z400 series got the microcode updates, so it was actually up to your vendor.

Hmm, don't think so. Vendors cannot create CPU microcode, Intel has to do that. And the relevant Intel document[1] clearly stated that they weren't going to do that.

The HP400 specs I found only list Bloomfield processors[2], not Westmere. Perhaps that is the source of your confusion?

1- https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents...

2- https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c01709672

X5690 (Westmere) works well in Z400. Here’s another article specifying the BIOS update:

https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/new-microcode-for...

Jesus, what a pain. Why the hell do you need to wait for your proprietary OS vendor or BIOS vendor to update anything? On Linux the kernel does that for you, just configure your bootloader to point the kernel to a microcode image and that's it. Why can't windows do the same?

Microsoft does release microcode updates for windows, here's an example: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/kb4494454-intel-mi...

You only really need the "early" microcode loading procedure (the one where you pass it in the bootloader) if you have a microcode problem that is so broken the system won't boot with it unfixed (...or you're toggling feature bits off and the kernel will break if you originally booted with those bits and then they go missing - e.g. the broken TSX implementations on Haswell/Broadwell).

Otherwise, just loading the microcode update once you get into the running OS is fine. I've never actually had a system that needed to use the former, but I've certainly used the latter.

That's a Meltdown and Spectre update from 2018. I'm talking about Microarchitectural Data Sampling, from 2019.

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