Posted on Monday, January 22 2018 @ 18:58 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Intel Data Center Group executive vice president Navin Shenoy issued a statement about the reboot issues that are caused by the fixes for the Meltdown and Spectre CPU vulnerabilities. The chip giant found the root cause for the Broadwell and Haswell platforms, and is working on a new update that will take care of the reboot issues. At the moment, Intel recommends customers and partners to stop deployment of current versions of the patch as they can cause not only unexpected reboots but also other unpredictable system behavior:
As we start the week, I want to provide an update on the reboot issues we reported Jan. 11. We have now identified the root cause for Broadwell and Haswell platforms, and made good progress in developing a solution to address it. Over the weekend, we began rolling out an early version of the updated solution to industry partners for testing, and we will make a final release available once that testing has been completed.
Based on this, we are updating our guidance for customers and partners:
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 behavior. For the full list of platforms, see the Intel.com Security Center site.
We ask that our industry partners focus efforts on testing early versions of the updated solution so we can accelerate its release. We expect to share more details on timing later this week.
We continue to urge all customers to vigilantly maintain security best practice and for consumers to keep systems up-to-date.
I apologize for any disruption this change in guidance may cause. The security of our products is critical for Intel, our customers and partners, and for me, personally. I assure you we are working around the clock to ensure we are addressing these issues.
I will keep you updated as we learn more and thank you for your patience.
