freebsd security - Jan 2018 - VMware pulling Intel specter patches

Might we be jumping the gun with updated firmware in devcpu-data?

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/7qjnfx/vmware_pulled_spectre_patches_on_friday/

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Apologies for any typos and autocorrect.
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Cy Schubert
<Cy.Schubert at cschubert.com> or <cy at freebsd.org>
The need of the many outweighs the greed of the few.
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On Tue, Jan 16, 2018 at 09:18:47AM -0800, Cy Schubert
wrote:
> Might we be jumping the gun with updated firmware in devcpu-data?
> 
>
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/7qjnfx/vmware_pulled_spectre_patches_on_friday/
From what I understand, the new Intel microcode only makes sense if
retpoline is used. On Skylake and above, retpoline by itself isn't
100% effective against Spectre. On those systems, retpoline requires
the new Intel microcode update along with enabling the new IBRS
feature that comes with it.

Simply updating the microcode on Intel systems doesn't really do much
on its own.

Granted, I could have misread and be completely wrong. Please let me
know if I am.

Thanks,

-- 
Shawn Webb
Cofounder and Security Engineer
HardenedBSD

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