News: 0001633109

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

AMD & Intel Roll Out New Linux Updates For Today's Patch Tuesday

([Hardware] 4 Hours Ago Patch Tuesday)


Today's Patch Tuesday is a busier one than normal for the quarter. Both AMD and Intel have rolled out new updates for Linux customers among other security disclosures today. Thankfully though the vulnerabilities don't appear to be too widespread or impactful.

Hitting the Linux kernel source tree minutes ago was the patch [1]x86/CPU/AMD: Prevent improper isolation of shared resources in Zen2's op cache . This is a patch to make sure resources are not improperly shared in the CPU's op cache and cause instruction corruption.

That AMD patch is specific to older Zen 2 processors and correlates to today's [2]CPU op cache corruption security bulletin. AMD-SB-7052 notes that a CPU operation cache issue on Zen 2 could lead to incorrect instructions being executed at a higher privilege level.

AMD also issued new bulletins concerning their Windows drivers and [3]potential vulnerabilities on a variety of Ryzen CPUs . A "MilanLaunchy" disclosure was also made for leveraging existing known vulnerabilities to allow the execution of arbitrary unsigned bootloaders on AMD EPYC Milan CPUs but is already corrected with newer system firmware.

AMD also acknowledged new security research of [4]TDXRay as a side-channel analysis of Intel TDX. AMD's SEV-SNP though isn't impacted by TDXRay. More details on today's AMD disclosures can be found via [5]the AMD product security center .

Meanwhile on the Intel side for Linux users today they released [6]Intel CPU Microcode 20260512 . This affects an Intel security issue as well as various functional issues affecting Arrow Lake, Lunar Lake, Panther Lake and Xeon Emerald Rapids / Sapphire Rapids / Sierra Forest / Granite Rapids processors.

[7]INTEL-SA-01420 is due to the potential exposure of sensitive information caused by shared microarchitectural predictor state when dealing with non-root VMs. This affects Arrow Lake / Lunar Lake / Panther Lake and mitigated by the new CPU microcode. The functional issues fixed for the other CPUs appear to be scattered throughout with none of those changes appearing too pressing.



[1] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=c21b90f77687075115d989e53a8ec5e2bb427ab1

[2] https://www.amd.com/en/resources/product-security/bulletin/amd-sb-7052.html

[3] https://www.amd.com/en/resources/product-security/bulletin/amd-sb-4017.html

[4] https://www.amd.com/en/resources/product-security/bulletin/amd-sb-3044.html

[5] https://www.amd.com/en/resources/product-security.html

[6] https://github.com/intel/Intel-Linux-Processor-Microcode-Data-Files/releases/tag/microcode-20260512

[7] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/security-center/advisory/intel-sa-01420.html



I Want My Bugs!

An entymologist in Georgia is threatening to sue Microsoft over false
advertising in Windows 2000. "According to Microsoft, Win2K contains
63,000 bugs," he explained. "However, the shrink-wrapped box I purchased
at CompUSSR only had one cockroach along with some worthless papers and a
shiny drink coaster. I got ripped off."

The entymologist hoped that the 63,000 promised bugs would greatly add to
his insect collection. "I had my doubts that Microsoft could deliver
63,000 insects in one small box for only US$299," he said. "However, with
a company as innovative as Microsoft, the sky is the limit. Or at least
that's what I thought." He then asked angrily, "Where do I want to go
today? Back to the store for a refund!"