Ubuntu releases AMD microcode firmware some computers fail to start now

­Last month, Canonical released AMD microcode firmware updates for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver), Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark), Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) to address the Spectre vulnerability. However, Canonical has apologized and issued patches to fix the fallback, while urging users to update their computers immediately, according to reports that the updated processor microcode firmware caused boot failures on some computers.

­"USN-3690-1 provides updated microcode to the AMD processor to resolve CVE-2017-5715 (that is, Spectre). Unfortunately, the update caused some systems to fail to boot. We apologize for restoring the update of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS," Canonical said in a security bulletin.

­at present, it seems that only Ubuntu 14.04 LTS users are affected, including a series of derivative versions such as Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu, etc. To address this problem, Canonical urged Ubuntu 14.04 LTS users to update the AMD microcode firmware to the amd64-microcode-3.20180524.1~ubuntu0.14.04.2+really20130710.1 package, which is now available in the official library.

­users can follow the instructions on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades for updates and remember to restart the computer after installing the new microcode version.