Spectre/Meltdown patches for Mac Pro and others

[lowrider]

I've used standard flashed R9 280 (aka HD7950) for update and Mavericks did the trick.

Spectre is still unpatched but firmware (BIOS) is now dated 02/02/2018

Also please note it's a native 5,1 (2010) made at the beginning of 2012. Maybe it only works well on 5,1 machines with Mid-2012 serial number.

My 5,1 is a 2010 model.  Again, no issues.  GPU is an MVC flashed GTX 1080.

Lou

[h9826790]

My cMP is a 2009 model flashed to 5,1. The latest firmware update performed directly by the HS installer.

[mysticalos]

I highly doubt apple will patch spectre or meltdown in an old machine. These machines are literally just getting apfs.efi flashes when apple upgrades the apfs driver. (which they did with 10.13.4, they didn't with .3 or any of supp updates. Last update of driver was 10.13.2 i think).

The mac EFI has to have latest apfs firmware for booting 10.13.x until the software apfs driver takes over.

[Rominator]

So the only way to get the new firmware is to download the entire OS?

I ran the Combo and I'm still on 84.

Seems kinda silly, guess it isn't a life & death thing.

[lowrider]

^^^^I downloaded the full Installer. Ran it just to install the FW update. I then used the Combo Updater to update from 10.13.3 to 10.13.4.

Lou

[Spacedust]

So the only way to get the new firmware is to download the entire OS?

I ran the Combo and I'm still on 84.

Seems kinda silly, guess it isn't a life & death thing.

I first updated to 10.13.4 with firmware 84. Then installed OS X 10.9.5 on a clean SSD and downloaded full 10.13.4 installer from AppStore and just updated the firmware to 85. Finally placed the original drive again and all works well with firmware 85.

CPU-Z now reports:  BIOS
Apple Inc. MP51.88Z.0085.B00.1802021746 (02/02/18)

[Spacedust]

https://newsroom.intel.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2018/04/microcode-update-guidance.pdf

Nehalem EP, Nehalem WS and Westmere EP, WS now in production!

Now they just need to update this file: https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/27591/Linux-Processor-Microcode-Data-File?product=873

[Spacedust]

Here it is: https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/27776/Linux-Processor-Microcode-Data-File?v=t

Sadly they've removed microcode.dat from the package. We need to create it on our own.

Update, no Westmere inside it:

== 20180425 Release ==
-- Updates upon 20180312 release --
Processor             Identifier     Version       Products
Model        Stepping F-MO-S/PI      Old->New
---- updated platforms ------------------------------------
GLK          B0       6-7a-1/01 0000001e->00000022 Pentium Silver N/J5xxx, Celeron N/J4xxx
---- removed platforms ------------------------------------
BDX-ML       B/M/R0   6-4f-1/ef 0b000021           Xeon E5/E7 v4; Core i7-69xx/68xx

-- Special release with caveats --
BDX-ML       B/M/R0   6-4f-1/ef           0b00002c Xeon E5/E7 v4; Core i7-69xx/68xx