Addressing Reboot Issues – Spectre & Meltdown Patches

Since these notes were released clients of ours have been patching their environments as per the guidelines.

Intel has revealed that a glitch in its patch for the Meltdown and Spectre CPU attacks is causing problems on PCs and datacenter equipment.  Intel’s firmware, which is delivered by hardware OEMs, is causing higher system reboots on systems with older Broadwell and Haswell CPUs. In a formal statement from Navin Shenoy (General Manager of Intel’s data centre group) the following advice has been issued.

“We have received reports from a few customers of higher system reboots after applying firmware updates. Specifically, these systems are running Intel Broadwell and Haswell CPUs for both client and data center. We are working quickly with these customers to understand, diagnose and address this reboot issue. If this requires a revised firmware update from Intel, we will distribute that update through the normal channels.  We are also working directly with data center customers to discuss the issue. End-users should continue to apply updates recommended by their system and operating system providers.” 

Navin’s statement and Intel’s “Security First pledge” can be found here.