Windows 10: Meltdown, spectre and old motherboard and CPU.

I have been getting in an argument with someone on another forum as they were saying the Windows patch is sufficient to protect against meltdown but my PS script says the patch is not enabled due to no hardware support. I googled the BIOS and I have the latest produced BIOS installed.

The poster who was arguing the software patch by MS is enough posted this link in his defence CPU bug patch saga: Antivirus tools caught with their hands in the Windows cookie jar • The Register

 

Response from MSI

Ticket:
Meltdown and Spectre bugs

Content:
Dear ,

Thanks for contacting MSI technical support.

Regarding your concern,as we said last time,this MB cannot be affected by the Meltdown and Spectre bugs.Thanks!

Thanks for your cooperation in advance!

Best Regards,

MSI Technical Support Team

 

The people doing the tickets are clueless, you should call them instead. Meltdown is affected by almost every Intel processor since 1995, while Spectre is affected on ARM and AMD pocessors aswell, and it needs a CPU microcode to be safeguarded againts, usually given by the board manufacturers.

In other news. I contacted MSI this morning (phone call) and I got a BIOS update for my X99. It will be pushed later on their website - possible this week - aswell as for X299, H110, H170, H270, B150, B250, Z170, Z270 chipset series. I mentioned older mainboards too, and their response was that they are looking into it, I guess they will see how big the user demand is, I don't really know as no one I called gave me more information that was already given to me.

 

Given the vast number of Motherboards and systems all the manufacturers have it may take a long time to get round to all of them, if they even bother with older systems.
Looking at Asus they appear to be updating from latest boards and working backwards.

 

Exactly I think most manufacturers are going coffee lake, kaby lake, going down and then ending on Haswell for system BIOS' for now, but none of them have really ruled out older boards either. I think one of them mentioned they will go down to Ivy-Bridge processors and LGA 1155 sockets, but I don't recall the name and I can't find an official statement. We'll just have to wait and see and try to make a few contacts here and there until other solutions becomes clear.

 

Thanks Faith for your info. I have sent a screen shot of the MS script which says firmware is needed but no reply so far I wonder if I have heard the last from them?

 

The Complete List Of CPUs Affected By Meltdown / Spectre - Tech ARP << this looks interesting no E8400 mentioned but could be incomplete.

Edit: Looks to be incomplete later in the article "This is a work in progress, and we will add more CPUs as and when they’re noted to be vulnerable to the Meltdown and Spectre exploits."

 

First victim of <Meltdown> in the wild???

 

Guys, do not complicate yourself with lists of processors. Too easy.
If the processor has FSB, it is not affected. If you do not have it, you are affected.
The older processors used the FSB to communicate with the cache and the north bridge. To accelerate cache access, the FSB and the north bridge were removed and it is the processor that controls it.

Especificaciones de producto de Intel Core™2 Duo Processor E8400 (6M Cache, 3.00 GHz, 1333 MHz FSB)
NOT AFFECTED.
It does not need a BIOS patch, nor a microcode patch, not even the Windows patch.

NVIDIA chips is affected. New driver.

 

Interesting, maybe you don't need a BIOS update then. *Smile And their support ticket is smarter than I expected them to be *Redface All I know is that this whole mess is very confusing.

 

meltdown affects all intel chipsets are u sure for this?

 

This is what I thought all processors since 1995 were reported to be affected, maybe that reporting was wrong. I ran a script from MS that said VA cache software support on my Win 10 1709 x64 box was enabled which is for Meltdown.

Speculation control settings for CVE-2017-5715 [branch target injection]

Hardware support for branch target injection mitigation is present: False
Windows OS support for branch target injection mitigation is present: True
Windows OS support for branch target injection mitigation is enabled: False
Windows OS support for branch target injection mitigation is disabled by system policy: False
Windows OS support for branch target injection mitigation is disabled by absence of hardware support: True

Speculation control settings for CVE-2017-5754 [rogue data cache load]

Hardware requires kernel VA shadowing: True
Windows OS support for kernel VA shadow is present: True
Windows OS support for kernel VA shadow is enabled: True
Windows OS support for PCID performance optimization is enabled: False [not required for security]

Suggested actions

* Install BIOS/firmware update provided by your device OEM that enables hardware support for the branch target injection mitigation.


BTIHardwarePresent : False
BTIWindowsSupportPresent : True
BTIWindowsSupportEnabled : False
BTIDisabledBySystemPolicy : False
BTIDisabledByNoHardwareSupport : True
KVAShadowRequired : True
KVAShadowWindowsSupportPresent : True
KVAShadowWindowsSupportEnabled : True
KVAShadowPcidEnabled : False