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Testers needed for updated packages: Intel and AMD CPUs affected

Earlier this week a few vulnerabilities have been reported to affect Intel and AMD CPUs. AlmaLinux OS Foundation calls for community to help to test updated packages for AlmaLinux OS 8 and AlmaLinux OS 9.

How do I install updated packages?

As AlmaLinux OS has changed its build processes in order to be ABI compatible with Red Hat, Testing repo has been created for packages that differ from RHEL and require additional testing by community.
To be able to help with testing, Testing repo should be enabled on AlmaLinux machine:

dnf install -y almalinux-release-testing

It's highly recommended to enable Testing repo on all non-production machines to participate in AlmaLinux development.

CVE-2022-40982 aka Downfall (Intel)

CVE-2022-40982 vulnerability is related to a Gather Data Sampling (GDS) transient execution side-channel vulnerability affecting Intel CPUs. This may allow an attacker to access stale data from previously used vector registers on the same physical core. Computing devices based on Intel Core processors from the 6th Skylake to (including) the 11th Tiger Lake generation are affected.

The vulnerability can be mitigated by updating CPU microcode - microcode_ctl package:

dnf update microcode_ctl

To check that the installation completed successfully, you can run:

rpm -qa microcode_ctl

Make sure that you've got the following version:

  • AlmaLinux OS 8 - microcode_ctl-20220809-2.20230808.1.el8_8.alma
  • AlmaLinux OS 9 - microcode_ctl-20220809-2.20230808.1.el9_2.alma

To update CPU microcode run the following:

echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/microcode/reload

CVE-2023-20569 (AMD)

CVE-2023-20569 vulnerability affects "Zen 3" and "Zen 4" AMD CPUs as it may allow an attacker to influence the return address prediction. This may potentially lead to information disclosure.

The vulnerability can be partially mitigated by updating linux-firmware package:

dnf update linux-firmware

To check that the installation completed successfully, you can run:

rpm -qa linux-firmware

Make sure that you've got the following version:

  • AlmaLinux OS 8 - linux-firmware-20230404-114.git2e92a49f.el8_8.alma.1
  • AlmaLinux OS 9 - linux-firmware-20230310-134.el9_2.alma.1

To update CPU microcode run the following:

echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/microcode/reload

Share your output

Once you have completed your testing, please help us by letting us know it works for you!

Please share the information (sanitized in whatever way you feel comfortable) in a comment on the issue that we have created specificaly for AlmaLinux 8 and for AlmaLinux 9 to track on bugs.almalinux.org:

Please include the output of the two commands from the test server and whether it worked for you:

lscpu
journalctl -k --grep=microcode

Come Help with Testing

If you want to contribute and help with testing - join the AlmaLinux community and the Release Engineering SIG chat channel.

We appreciate any contribution as they help us keep AlmaLinux OS free and make it better!

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