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Comment by smartmic | Hacker News Reader

> Closing these sorts of gaps requires a special update to the processor’s microcode. This can be done via a BIOS or operating system update and should therefore be installed on our PCs in one of the latest cumulative updates from Windows.

Why mention only Windows, what about Linux users?

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Intel distributes microcode updates for Linux here: https://github.com/intel/Intel-Linux-Processor-Microcode-Dat... , and the distro are all set up to pull from there and distribute automatically.

Not expert enough to know what to look for to see if these particular mitigations are present yet.

On an Ubuntu 24.04.2 machine:

   dpkg -l | grep microcode

   ii  amd64-microcode 3.20231019.1ubuntu2.1 amd64 Processor microcode firmware for AMD CPUs
   ii  intel-microcode 3.20250211.0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 Processor microcode firmware for Intel CPUs
   ii  iucode-tool 2.3.1-3build1 amd64 Intel processor microcode tool

Researchers say this is CVE-2024-45332.

INTEL-SA-01247 covers that CVE.

Microcode release 20250512 has that INTEL-SA mitigated.

https://github.com/intel/Intel-Linux-Processor-Microcode-Dat...

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/security-center/advi...

The Linux kernel has had microcode loading support (`CONFIG_MICROCODE` / `CONFIG_MICROCODE_INTEL`) but many years, but it does require that Intel release the microcode files necessary for distribution maintainers to update the packages, then it should be included in a system update.

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