Windows Client Guidance against speculative execution vulnerabilities

johngalt · 04 Apr 2018

Indeed - and I have set Tapatalk to not subscribe to the forum itself, so it did not make me aware of the new post...

Superfly · 06 Apr 2018

Sweet..

Windows Client Guidance against speculative execution vulnerabilities-capture.png

Vanilla RS4 .. nothing beats a good bios/UEFI ...

IronZorg89 · 06 Apr 2018

Superfly said:

Sweet..

Vanilla RS4 .. nothing beats a good bios/UEFI ...

Does that mean you have already downloaded and installed the Spring Creators Update (RS4) and it has updated your BIOS/UEFI. I am just trying to understand. I heard that RS4 is supposedly to be released on April 10, 2018...

johngalt · 06 Apr 2018

Windows 10 RS4 SCU has (in all probability) already been released as 17133.1, first to IP, next to RP, and we here at 10F are fairly confident that it *is* SCU, and that there will not be another build number for it.

And Windows does not ever updated the BIOS / UEFI on machines. That is handled by the manufacturer of the motherboard, or in the case of pre-packaged systems, by the OEM that packaged them (Dell, HP, etc.)

IronZorg89 · 07 Apr 2018

johngalt said:

Windows 10 RS4 SCU has (in all probability) already been released as 17133.1, first to IP, next to RP, and we here at 10F are fairly confident that it *is* SCU, and that there will not be another build number for it.

And Windows does not ever updated the BIOS / UEFI on machines. That is handled by the manufacturer of the motherboard, or in the case of pre-packaged systems, by the OEM that packaged them (Dell, HP, etc.)

Thanks for the heads-up. I know that MS does not deliver BIOS/UEFI updates, but my understanding brings me to believe that they are working with some of those manufacturers for mobos in order to come up with a patch that will mitigate the vulnerabilities of Spectre & Meltdown. This is usually delivered via Windows Updates.

I understand that a mitigation patch is not the same as a real BIOS/UEFI firmware update from the manufacturer, but the post from @Superfly screenshotted above made me wonder whether he had actually updated his BIOS/UEFI from the manufacturer or he had had the SCU before the official release date.

Superfly · 07 Apr 2018

@IronZorg89

Yep, firmware update only from the Dell website.

Code:

+Registry: HARDWARE\DESCRIPTION\System\BIOS
  BiosMajorRelease: 1
  BiosMinorRelease: 18
  ECFirmwareMajorRelease: 255
  ECFirmwareMinorRelease: 255
  BaseBoardManufacturer: Dell Inc.
  BaseBoardProduct: 0VHKV0
  BaseBoardVersion: A00
  BIOSReleaseDate: 12/08/2017
  BIOSVendor: Dell Inc.
  BIOSVersion: 1.18.6
  SystemFamily: Latitude
  SystemManufacturer: Dell Inc.
  SystemProductName: Latitude E5470
  SystemSKU: 06DE
  SystemVersion:

IronZorg89 · 07 Apr 2018

Superfly said:

@IronZorg89

Yep, firmware update only from the Dell website.[/CODE]

Thanks for letting me know. I am not as lucky as you are. HP Support page has not given yet any sign as to when I will get an update for my CPUID: 306C3 (HP Envy)

Ground Sloth · 07 Apr 2018

IronZorg89 said:

I understand that a mitigation patch is not the same as a real BIOS/UEFI firmware update from the manufacturer, but the post from @Superfly screenshotted above made me wonder whether he had actually updated his BIOS/UEFI from the manufacturer or he had had the SCU before the official release date.

If you get the patch from the Microsoft Update Catalog, then Windows will load the microcode update into CPU memory on startup instead of the BIOS/UEFI. That's the only difference.

Ground Sloth · 07 Apr 2018

What's going on with AMD? At one point they said they were going to release microcode updates to address Spectre Variant 2, but as far as I know they haven't.

storageman · 08 Apr 2018

Ground Sloth said:

What's going on with AMD? At one point they said they were going to release microcode updates to address Spectre Variant 2, but as far as I know they haven't.

Yep - no word about anything since the first reply back in January. I to have an AMD system under the HP label that is in need of something. But the good news my Intel machine is safe