On Thu, May 24, 2018 at 10:08 AM, Michal Skrivanek <michal.skrivanek@redhat.com> wrote:

[snip]

>
> Intel has been promising microcode updates since January when Spectre first appeared and yet except for the very newest CPUs we haven't seen anything and in the cases of older CPUs, I wonder if we are ever going to see anything even if Intel has is on their “roadmap"

I believe they did release it[1], albeit late. SandyBridge for sure, and *some* Westmere and Nehalem.

[snip]

[1] https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/27776?v=t

I confirm. I was also able for example to update the microcode of my Asus U36SD laptop, bought in late 2012, with the microcode released by Intel.

My cpu model that I searched for inside the list at the link, from cpuinfo:

model name : Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2620M CPU @ 2.70GHz

From dmidecode on this system that is now on Fedora 28 it confirms the latest Bios version released by Asus:

Handle 0x0000, DMI type 0, 24 bytes

BIOS Information

Vendor: American Megatrends Inc.

Version: U36SD.206

Release Date: 09/26/2011

and by dmesg you can see the microcode update released on February by Intel:

[ 0.000000] microcode: microcode updated early to revision 0x2d, date = 2018-02-07

[ 0.000000] Linux version 4.16.10-300.fc28.x86_64 (mockbuild@bkernel01.phx2.fedoraproject.org) (gcc version 8.1.1 20180502 (Red Hat 8.1.1-1) (GCC)) #1 SMP Mon May 21 14:41:48 UTC 2018

And there is another update released on late April I didn't apply yet...

Gianluca