How a months-old AMD microcode bug destroyed my weekend [UPDATED]

'This weekend, I was excited to deploy my first Ryzen 3000-powered
workstation in my home office. Unfortunately, a microcode
bug—originally discovered in July but still floating around in large
numbers in the wild—wrecked my good time. I eventually got my Ryzen
3700X system working, and it's definitely fast. But unfortunately,
it's still bugged, and there's no easy way to fix it.

Not long after the product launch, AMD Ryzen 3000 customers started
noticing problems with their shiny new CPUs. Windows users couldn't
successfully launch Destiny 2 (due to a power-management bug,
unrelated to the one sidelining my system), and Linux users in many
cases couldn't even get their system to boot. Jason Evangelho covered
the initial discovery and report of the bug at Forbes back in July,
and an AMD representative provided him with a statement by email:

"AMD has identified the root cause and implemented a BIOS fix for an
issue impacting the ability to run certain Linux distributions and
Destiny 2 on Ryzen 3000 processors. We have distributed an updated
BIOS to our motherboard partners, and we expect consumers to have
access to the new BIOS over the coming days."

This sounds happy and upbeat, but the reality isn't quite so simple.
When there's a bug in the CPU microcode, you're at the mercy of your
motherboard vendor to release a new system BIOS that will update it
for you—you can't just go to some download link at AMD and apply a fix
yourself.

AMD responded to the bug in July. As far as I can tell, AMD did so
only by direct email response; there's no press release about it—and
the company's response made it sound like everything would be fixed in
a week or two.

I have the unfortunate duty of reporting to you, three months later,
that it is not.'

-- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/10/how-a-months-old-amd-microcode-bug-destroyed-my-weekend/

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
_______________________________________________
wlug mailing list -- [email protected] | To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://list.waikato.ac.nz/postorius/lists/wlug.list.waikato.ac.nz