Response to Meltdown and Spectre

[Christian Weisgerber]

On 2018-02-02, Paul Pathiakis via freebsd-questions <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org> wrote:

> Intels patches have 'bricked' processors.  Yes, made them totally 
> unusable as they rushed them out the door.  They pulled them immediately 
> and told people to destroy them.

That is wildly exaggerated.  I'm running several machines with the
microcode updates that Intel later pulled--in fact I'm typing this
on one of them--and nothing has been bricked.  Intel is extremely
coy with details, but it stands to reason that the reliability
problems that caused them to retract the microcode will only appear
when the operating system actually uses the newly introduced
IBRS/IBPB/STIBP features.

-- 
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy at mips.inka.de