Dell and HP Advise All Their Customers To Not Install Spectre BIOS Updates
'The Spectre and Meltdown mess continues with Dell now recommending their customers to not install the BIOS updates that are supposed to resolve the Spectre (Variant 2) vulnerabilities. These updates have been causing numerous problems for users including performance issues, boot issues, reboot issues, and general system stability. Due to this, Dell EMC has updated its knowledgebase article with a statement advising customers to not install the BIOS update and to potentially rollback to the previous BIOS if their computers are exhibiting "unpredictable system behavior". ZDNet reports that HP too has issued a similar advisory. The computer manufacturer pulled its softpaqs BIOS updates with Intel's patches from its website, and said it would be releasing a BIOS update with a previous version of Intel's microcode on Thursday.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/01/24/1312241 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
On Thu, 25 Jan 2018 10:20:05 +1300, Peter Reutemann wrote:
'The Spectre and Meltdown mess continues with Dell now recommending their customers to not install the BIOS updates that are supposed to resolve the Spectre (Variant 2) vulnerabilities.'
They’ve known about the problem for months. Now it seems they’re rushing out patches without proper testing.
On Thu, 25 Jan 2018 10:20:05 +1300, Peter Reutemann wrote:
'The Spectre and Meltdown mess continues with Dell now recommending their customers to not install the BIOS updates that are supposed to resolve the Spectre (Variant 2) vulnerabilities.'
Apparently Intel told the vendors about the vulnerabilities (under nondisclosure, of course) on November 29 <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/25/intel_spectre_disclosed_flaws_november/>: That date is about six months after the chip maker was warned in June 2017 about the blunders in its blueprints by researchers at Google and university academics. So it gave itself a six-month head-start. Yet nobody, it seems, has been able to come up with a BIOS update that works yet.
participants (2)
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro -
Peter Reutemann