Backport request, 16.04 LTS (w/ Spectre/Meltdown fixups)

[Jason Mills]

Once the post Spectre/Meltdown situation has stabilized, it would be appreciated if that edition of Intel CPU microcode is backported into Xenial / 16.04 LTS.

Thanks :-)

[Simon Déziel (sdeziel)]

So far, the intel-microcode package has been kept in sync between all the supported releases. They all get the "stable" version at the same time. If you'd like to help testing, there is version 3.20180312.0 that is currently in QA and available from https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-security-proposed/+archive/ubuntu/ppa.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Jason Mills (virtualjmills)]

@sdeziel -- I have tested on an Ivy Bridge era (i5-3427U) and Apollo Lake era (N3350) system thus far. The former is covered by the Intel 20180312 release, the latter is not. If time permits I'll also test on a Skylake system.

Everything seems to be working properly w/r2 updated microcode query and load during early InitRAMfs phase.

Install media was Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS Server x86_64, patched to current but with both old and new kernels available. I did have to pull the .deb packages in manually, the PPA you referenced is no longer accepted automagically -- signing key cannot be found.

Details for the tests I performed on the Ivy Bridge system follow:

admin@ubuntu-1604-microcode-test:~$ dmesg | grep -i microcode
[ 2.297820] microcode: CPU0 sig=0x306a9, pf=0x10, revision=0x1b
[ 2.297849] microcode: CPU1 sig=0x306a9, pf=0x10, revision=0x1b
[ 2.297854] microcode: CPU2 sig=0x306a9, pf=0x10, revision=0x1b
[ 2.297872] microcode: CPU3 sig=0x306a9, pf=0x10, revision=0x1b
[ 2.297946] microcode: Microcode Update Driver: v2.01 <email address hidden>, Peter Oruba

admin@ubuntu-1604-microcode-test:~$ dpkg -l | grep -E -- '(linux-|intel-microcode|iucode)'
ii intel-microcode 3.20180312.0~ubuntu16.04.1 amd64 Processor microcode firmware for Intel CPUs
ii iucode-tool 2.1.2-2 amd64 Intel processor microcode tool
ii linux-base 4.0ubuntu1 all Linux image base package
ii linux-firmware 1.157.17 all Firmware for Linux kernel drivers
ii linux-headers-4.4.0-116 4.4.0-116.140 all Header files related to Linux kernel version 4.4.0
ii linux-headers-4.4.0-116-generic 4.4.0-116.140 amd64 Linux kernel headers for version 4.4.0 on 64 bit x86 SMP
ii linux-headers-4.4.0-62 4.4.0-62.83 all Header files related to Linux kernel version 4.4.0
ii linux-headers-4.4.0-62-generic 4.4.0-62.83 amd64 Linux kernel headers for version 4.4.0 on 64 bit x86 SMP
ii linux-headers-generic 4.4.0.116.122 amd64 Generic Linux kernel headers
ii linux-image-4.4.0-116-generic 4.4.0-116.140 amd64 Linux kernel image for version 4.4.0 on 64 bit x86 SMP
ii linux-image-4.4.0-62-generic 4.4.0-62.83 amd64 Linux kernel image for version 4.4.0 on 64 bit x86 SMP
ii linux-image-extra-4.4.0-116-generic 4.4.0-116.140 amd64 Linux kernel extra modules for version 4.4.0 on 64 bit x86 SMP
ii linux-image-extra-4.4.0-62-generic 4.4.0-62.83 amd64 Linux kernel extra modules for version 4.4.0 on 64 bit x86 SMP
ii linux-signed-generic 4.4.0.116.122 amd64 Complete Signed Generic Linux kernel an...

[Steve Beattie (sbeattie)]

All releases of Ubuntu (except for Ubuntu 12.04 ESM, where the kernel does not support early microcode loading, and the changes to add support are significant and would likely introduce regressions) received backported intel-microcode updates for Spectre/Meltdown.

Closing this bug. Thanks.