On Sun, 24 Jan 2021, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote: Regressions were indeed reported (as expected). A few days ago, Intel > published relevant information pinpointing the regression on Skylake D0 > and Skylake R0 processors to specific conditions (detailed below for > completeness). > > The 3.20201118.1~deb10u1 version of the package (the one I am proposing > for the stable update) contains changes not (yet?) in unstable to > address the Skylake D0/R0 issue: they had their updates frozen > to the same revision currently in Debian stable.
I better explain that in a more direct, clear way: The reason why I want to update the package in stable is: the updated microcode in this package have security mitigations for a few newer speculative execution sidechannel attacks, and fix some critical defects/"errata" on many recent processor models, *other than Skylake R0/D0*. The s-p-u version of the intel-microcode package I am proposing has *less* changes than the packages currently in unstable/testing. The microcode updates have been tested in unstable since 2020-12-27, and in testing since 2020-01-02. Issues with it were reported in Ubuntu and Arch Linux, for specific system vendors and computer models (not processor models -- i.e. it does not look like a general issue with the microcode updates) when running outdated firmware. A *general* microcode update issue was reported only for Skylake D0/R0. The offending microcode changes for Skylake D0/R0 are *reverted* in this s-p-u package. To do that, the package keeps the microcode for these two processor models *exactly the same* as they already are in Debian stable. The package changes when compared to the packages currently in Debian stable are: 1. microcode binary data (except for Skylake D0 and R0) 2. upstream documentation 3. Debian metadata (changelog, version). Thanks! -- Henrique Holschuh
