It's "Patch Tuesday" and Intel is out with new CPU microcode for Linux users in addition to making public 30 new security advisories that affect a range of Intel products.

[1]Intel CPU microcode-20251111 was published today. The noted changes are for addressing a range of functional issues from 12th Gen Intel Core CPUs to newer, including 4th and 5th Xeon Scalable CPUs as well as Xeon 6 processors too.

Among the functional issues addressed are for Lunar Lake with performance monitoring events for memory bound stalls potentially being undercount, Granite Rapids microcode updates taking care of the CXL mode incorrectly identifying ASPM L1 aborts and the PCIe root port may not reduce link width, Emerald Rapids seeing updates due to memory uncorrectable errors with multiple ranks on a channel, and for Raptor Lake REP SCASB or REP CMPSB instructions may return incorrect results. Basically this batch of Intel CPU microcode updates address a variety of different functional issues with Intel's mobile / desktop / server processors but nothing that appears to be security related this time around.

After seeing the new Intel CPU microcode drop for Patch Tuesday, I also decided to check the Intel [2]security center for which there were 30 new security advisories made public today. The Intel security advisories today range from their Slim bootloader to Gaudi AI software to VTune, the Intel NPU driver, QAT, oneAPI Math Kernel Library, and a variety of other Intel drivers and software libraries.

At least no new Linux kernel patches were needed/merged today as part of the Patch Tuesday embargo lift.



[1] https://github.com/intel/Intel-Linux-Processor-Microcode-Data-Files/releases/tag/microcode-20251111

[2] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/security-center/default.html