Intel on Meltdown and Spectre patches: Stop deploying fix as it can lead to more reboots, unexpected system behaviour issues.
Intel’s solution for the Meltdown and Spectre security flaws just got a whole lot worse. The company which had started deploying patches for all of the processors impacted by these flaws, has now asked customers to stop using these as it can lead to high number of reboots and unexpected system behaviour. Meltdown as a flaw is believed to impact only Intel processors, while Spectre impacts nearly all modern processors and thus extends beyond the PC world.
Intel’s Navin Shenoy, who is executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group at Intel Corporation, wrote new blogpost on the company’s newsroom pointing out the reboot issues. The post says, “We recommend that OEMs, cloud service providers, system manufacturers, software vendors and end users stop deployment of current versions, as they may introduce higher than expected reboots and other unpredictable system behavior.” Intel had reported about the reboot issues on January 11 with regards to the Spectre and Meltdown patches.
The post by Intel’s Shenoy says, “We have now identified the root cause for Broadwell and Haswell platforms, and made good progress in developing a solution to address it. Over the weekend, we began rolling out an early version of the updated solution to industry partners for testing, and we will make a final release available once that testing has been completed.”
Intel’s latest statement asking customers to stop deployment of security patches for Spectre and Meltdown comes weeks after its CEO Brian Krzanich had issued a statement at CES 2018 saying, the company has issued updates to all processors, products introduced in the past five years and expecting to cover most by end of January.
He had also said in the statement that “some workloads will have a larger impact than others.” It was reported that Intel’s new processors including SkyLake, Kaby Lake processors were also impacted severely by the patches and were facing a performance hit. It was earlier argued that PC performance could take a hit by 30 per cent in some cases with the Meltdown and Spectre fix.