On 01/11/2018 05:05 AM, Nico Huber wrote:
you seem to be misinformed about the G505s. There is no open-source gfx init for AMD (not in firmware, not in the OS), so within your require- ments it's not usable as a laptop.
I forgot to include my usual suffix mentioning that blobs are required for video (and power management)
I believe it is still much better than the C2D laptops in terms of security despite the video blob as it has an IOMMU [1] and no ME/PSP. [1] with the high end quad core CPU option
(as the previous C2D/C2Q's such as the X200 are now permanently insecure without intervention from intel apparently)
It depends on the software you run. Please read more about Meltdown and Spectre. When you understood it, you can still start to worry.
At this point even a massive performance loss is better than having to throw out so much now-useless hardware.
Yes? and that can be accomplished without microcode updates, AFAIK.
I was and still am under the impression that fixing both issue classes requires microcode updates, can you link to a better explanation?