Intel warns people away from its bork-ridden Spectre patch
INTEL HAS ALERTED users of its chips to avoid its faulty patch designed to plug the Spectre CPU security hole.
Intel chip fans have been reporting that the chipmaker’s initial Spectre patch was causing random reboots of their computers running Broadwell and Haswell generation CPUs .
Rather than bury its head in the sand, Intel has done the sensible thing – albeit one week later – and advised people and supplier partners to stop using the bork-ridden patch.
„We recommend that OEMs, cloud service providers, system manufacturers, software vendors and end users stop deployment of current versions, as they may introduce higher than expected reboots and other unpredictable system behaviour,“ Navin Shenoy, general manager of the Data Centre Group at Intel explained.
But Spectre can’t be ignored. So Intel apparently figured out the „root cause“ of the reboots and is now working on another patch, putting it through its paces to ensure that when it rolls out, it doesn’t add to the problems Spectre seems to keep kicking up.
Related: Linus Torvalds slams Intel’s Spectre and Meltdown fixes as ‚garbage‘
„We ask that our industry partners focus efforts on testing early versions of the updated solution so we can accelerate its release,“ added Shenoy, who noted more information about the patch will be revealed shortly.
And that’s really about all we have to go on at the time of writing.
It’s worth noting that Spectre isn’t as dangerous a flaw to cybersecurity as Meltdown, which affects only Intel processors. But Spectre seems to be the one that’s causing Intel the biggest headache; it managed to plug Meltdown pretty swiftly but at some performance cost to its processors.
While there have been no reports of either Spectre or Meltdown being exploited in the wild, we doubt the hardware-level flaws are likely to be swept under the carpet anytime soon. µ
