Heads-up: update microcode on all Intel Ivy Bridge/Haswell processors
Intel issued a high priority microcode update for all Intel processors with
Ivy Bridge and Haswell microarchitectures (i.e. 4th gen and 5th gen Core
processors, Xeon E3v2, Xeon E3v3, Xeon E5v2 and Xeon E7v2, plus several
models of the Pentium and Celeron processors).
Updated intel-microcode packages (upstream version 20140624) are already
available for non-free unstable, and will be available in at most a few
hours for both the non-free testing (jessie) and non-free stable-backports
(wheezy-backports) distributions.
Updates for non-free stable (wheezy) and non-free oldstable (squeeze) will
be issued, but they will take a (possibly large) while to clear the approval
process.
As usual, we don't have definitive information about what was fixed in this
microcode update. However, we do have some data:
This update is reported to better fix critical errata previously fixed by
the 20140430 update. We cannot verify at this time whether other Ivy Bridge
processors than the Xeon E5v2/E7v2 also have the same critical errata or
not, but if they do, it is likely fixed by this new update.
The update has other unspecified fixes, possibly including:
* enable RDRAND support on some Ivy Bridge processors;
* avoid triggering an incorrect catastrophic shutdown (causes immediate
system failure) well below the critical thermal threshold on some Ivy
Bridge processors;
--
"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
Henrique Holschuh
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