Newest Gnome versus LTS

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 18 Jul 2019 14:06:15 +0200, Oliver Grawert wrote:
>Am Donnerstag, den 18.07.2019, 13:31 +0200 schrieb Ralf Mardorf:
>> I wonder how important microcode updates are.  
>
>judge yourself by just looking at these three links ;)

I wasn't clear enough, since Intel still provides microcode for my CPU,
I asked the crystal ball, if updates for the microcode are still that
important, if matured microcode already exists.

$ cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/vulnerabilities/*
Mitigation: PTE Inversion; VMX: conditional cache flushes, SMT disabled
Mitigation: Clear CPU buffers; SMT disabled
Mitigation: PTI
Mitigation: Speculative Store Bypass disabled via prctl and seccomp
Mitigation: __user pointer sanitization
Mitigation: Full generic retpoline, IBPB: conditional, IBRS_FW, STIBP: disabled, RSB filling

In the beginning there were less mitigations, however, I suspect before
Intel stops providing microcode for my CPU, there unlikely is much more
that could be done, related to Spectre and Meltdown. It can't be solved
and the mitigations are already now quite matured.

The question is, how likely it is, that old Intel CPUs will suffer from
something new, that is as problematic as Spectre and Meltdown are.

Microcode is not only important regarding security, it's also important
to fix possible issues with CPU features, but I guess that fixes for
those issues are also already matured.

While AMD CPUs don't suffer that much from Spectre and Meltdown as
Intel CPUs do, I don't want to use AMD CPUs again, since I get rid of
almost all issues I experienced with my AMD CPUs when I migrated to
Intel. Pro-audio performance is way better and there are absolutely no
graphics related issues. NVIDIA and ATI are a PITA. However, in regards
to Spectre and Meltdown, it might be better to use AMD CPUs.