Thx a lot for checking this, you gave me the missing part in the puzzle.

It was hard to find the actual patch increase, but the latest commit lists the current patch level:

+      - New microcodes:
+      + Family=0x17 Model=0x31 Stepping=0x00: Patch=0x0830107a Length=3200 bytes   <--- Your processor, higher patch version
+      + Family=0x17 Model=0xa0 Stepping=0x00: Patch=0x08a00008 Length=3200 bytes
+    - Updated microcodes:
+      + Family=0x17 Model=0x08 Stepping=0x02: Patch=0x0800820d Length=3200 bytes
+      + Family=0x17 Model=0x01 Stepping=0x02: Patch=0x0800126e Length=3200 bytes
+    - CVE-2023-20593

I guess that pretty much confirms the theory, AMD only rolls microcode for Epyc and there is no magic sauce why the patch version are all over the place on their consumer chips. For me, the worst thing is their lack of transparency. Guess they’re justification is ridiculous and incomprehensible from a customer standpoint, otherwise they would have communicated it.

Also funny that Ubuntu 22.04 doesn’t ship microcode for Zen3 and higher, why don’t they backport such things?

The family is printed in the kernel log: [ 0.380496] smpboot: CPU0: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12-Core Processor (family: 0x19, model: 0x21, stepping: 0x2)

Anyone having hardware access to an epic CPU ? Could you please report the numbers from zstdcat /lib/firmware/amd-ucode/README.zst vs the patch level reported by grep microcode /proc/cpuinfo, even if you run a different distro ?

Let’s hope they’ll use GNU Taler for this. I only heard it being considered in Switzerland.

If Linus would be a non-techie, he would have tried to install it with a graphical AppStore, it wouldn’t have worked and he’d either given up or found the flatpak version of Steam, which would have worked. Not restricting power users is a good aspect. If I play around with Windows registry to force the removal of edge, Linus would blame me, not Windows. You have to differentiate between things normal users tried and things Linus attempted because he has some technical knowledge.

Some random user saying anything doesn’t make anything true, you don’t believe flat-earthers on the internet, either.

The bug was that you couldn’t install steam without faking a the installation of a dep that went down the dependency chain ending in a conflict of essential packages. The functionality to still proceed is a feature. Linus could also just have copied rm -rf --no-preserve-root / from the internet as solution and would have trusted it blindly. If you want to be nannied all the way, I’d suggest you switch to iOS for everything.

IIRC it was already fixed when Linus did this, just not distributed. It was caused by the bluntness Linus developed due to unmeaningful Windows warnings in the 1st place.