16 March 2018

Microsoft Compatibility Reporting Tool Spectre and Meltdown Patch

Ever since the Spectre and Meltdown issues arose, we have been waiting on patching, at least reliable patching. Microsoft has taken it on itself to patch systems for the vulnerability. ExtremeTech wrote an excellent article on Microsoft's solution which gave me the thought to write a script for telling which systems are compatible. To determine the minimum family and model compatible with the patch, I used the data from this Intel page that associates family and model to the microarchitecture code name. I converted the family and model from hexadecimal to decimal. That is how I came up with the bare minimum being Family 6 Model 42.

NOTE: The ExtremeTech article includes the Haswell processor as also being compatible. We do not have any Haswell processors in my environment, so I am not able to know what the minimum family and model are for Haswell. If you do have Haswell processors in your environment, I would appreciate you running the following PowerShell cmdlet and reply here with the output so that I can include it in the script. Thanks.

(Get-WmiObject win32_processor).Caption

The script can be executed using the new Scripts tool in SCCM, which is how this was done in my environment.

You can find the script from my GitHub site.

Here is what the output looks like:



2 comments:

  1. Hello! I have a HP 820 G1 with Intel CPU i5_4300U. This is a Haswell CPU. The output from (get-wmiobject win32_processor).caption is: Intel64 Family 6 Model 69 Stepping 1.

    Hope this helps.

    Bye

    ReplyDelete