Canonical Fixes Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Regression Causing Boot Failures on AMD PCs

Last month, on June 20, 2018, Canonical released an AMD microcode firmware update for the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver), Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark), Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating systems to address the well-known Spectre microprocessor side-channel vulnerability. Unearthed by Jann Horn of Google Project Zero, the Spectre security flaw revealed the fact that devices powered by modern processors using branch prediction and speculative execution may allow local attackers to expose sensitive information, including kernel memory, by reading the memory via so-called side-channel attacks.