Response to Meltdown and Spectre

[Valeri Galtsev]

On 01/31/18 14:13, Zahrir, Abderrahmane wrote:
> Hi Guys,
> 
> I understand that you have not been notified early enough about the Meltdown and spectre security flow.
> However do we have a rough estimate (something like an approximate month) of when a patch will be available for the latest version 11.1 and possibly 11.0?

First of all, I'm by no means speaking for FreeBSD developers team, I am 
just one of the users (sysadmins who runs FreeBSD on several servers).

I would not ask FreeBSD folks to speed it up, or anything. They really 
do great job to deal with somebody's else crap the best system 
architecture wise way possible. One thing could be mentioned here: Intel 
released new microcode some time ago, which effectively was bricking 
some of end user's machines. They withdrew it, and recommended to hold 
off, and go back to old microcode. [Co-]incidentally, RedHat removed 
from its updates patching microcode; this they had to do for the same 
reason, and basically made it the issue between end user and CPU (or 
machine?) manufacturer. Sorry if I misinterpreted anything (most of 
which I know from CentOS general mail list).

Valeri

> 
> Regards, Dahman

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Valeri Galtsev
Sr System Administrator
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
University of Chicago
Phone: 773-702-4247
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