Hi, I am thinking about about buying an x86 Ultra to be used as my day to day computer since my laptop decided to die on me (although I'd say that 11 years is enough). I was thinking about getting another laptop but seeing as I'm primarily using it at home and I want to delve into hardware tinkering with Arduino and such I think this would be the perfect match. Plus I believe it is powerful enough to be used as a main computer right? But I wanted to know whether it's affected by any of those vulnerabilities, if anyone that's running the current version of Windows 10 could run the following utility and report back with a screenshot I'd appreciate it loads: https://www.grc.com/inspectre.htm Thank you anyway for everything .
The problem is hardware based, and pretty much everything is affected. The effective and recommended workaround at this point is OS patching. Udoo isn’t supplying an operating system...
In addition to kernel patching/software fixes all on 3 of SA-00088 (Spectre #1, Spectre #2, and Meltdown) vulnerabilities, Spectre variant 2 also needs microcode patching, usually delivered thru new BIOS update (via OEM channel.)
I was led to believe that software mitigations are not enough to address those vulnerabilities like ccs_hello says, it requires a firmware upgrade or some sort of hardware cooperation. Since the N3710 is vulnerable to all three CVEs I was wondering if a microcode update was made available to Udoo and already pushed as a BIOS update or what's to become of it. These are the list of vulnerabilities that affect Ultra's processor right now: https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerab.../version_id-233419/Intel-Pentium-N-N3710.html The utility I mentioned above checks whether the OS is patched and firmware upgraded and gives us more info on how things are going. For example the processor of my now defunct laptop was old enough that Meltdown mitigations in Windows made its performance drop: But a friend's laptop although not updated either was in a better position:
