Updated intel firmware

[ken@…]

On lkml, there are mentions of new intel firmware to work around the Spectre vulnerability, at a cost of slowness.

Our current link is out of date, but it links to a newer page with firmware dated 20171117. I'm guessing that is probably the new stuff.

[ken@…]

Downgrading in severity, this seems problematic :

Nothing new for my Skylake (that is more than 5 years old, so nothing really expected, but nothing new for my haswell, and the new firmware for my skylake does not load.

I tried late loading, but it reported it failed to store it. Tried early loading just in case, but noting got applied. Cleaned it out, restored earlier version for early loading, still did not apply. I've now copied the earlier version into /lib/firmware and late loaded it, but this release certainly doesn't seem to fix anything here.

[bdubbs@…]

I downloaded the new tarball and compared it to the previous. Here is what I found:

                        family model step firmware

Workstation i5-6500       6      94   3     06-5e-03
Development i7-5820K      6      63   2     06-3f-02
Laptop      i7-4700MQ     6      60   3     06-3c-03
Other       Pentium G3220 6      60   3     06-3c-03

            size 20170707  20171117  md5sum
06-5e-03           98304     98304   identical
06-3f-02           32768     32768   identical
06-3c-03           22528     22528   identical

It's interesting that the i7-4700MQ and Pentium G3220 have the same family/model/stepping. I think that is the same as your i7-4790 also.

In any case, for my systems the newer tarball does not produce newer firmware.

[bdubbs@…]

I will update the firmware page to the latest version at my next commit. I'll also add a note that the page will give a notice at the top of the page if the url is not the latest available.

[bdubbs@…]

The firmware page has been updated at revision 19653.

Closing.