thanks for taking care!

Am 21.11.2023 um 17:35 schrieb Antoine Beaupre:
Package: release.debian.org
Severity: normal
Tags: bookworm
User: release.debian....@packages.debian.org
Usertags: pu
X-Debbugs-Cc: needrest...@packages.debian.org, pmatth...@debian.org
Control: affects -1 + src:needrestart

[ Reason ]
needrestart, starting with bookworm, supports more microcode checks
than before. In particular, it now checks AMD CPUs.

The amd64-microcode package seem to ship *less* firmware files than
its Intel counterpart, which leads to *many* machines (half a dozen)
in our fleet to suddenly start warning us about "UNKNOWN" firmware
status.

[ Impact ]
Spurious warnings lead to alert fatigue and consequently untimely
security upgrades, which is the main reason why I'm considering this
serious enough to warrant a stable update.

[ Tests ]
The provided patches were tested in production on a fleet (~50
machines) of Debian bookworm servers on torproject.org.

[ Risks ]
Code is relatively simple. There's a risk that operators who did *not*
install the amd64-microcode package will not get a warning, but that's
consider an operator error, and out of scope for this.

[ Checklist ]
   [x] *all* changes are documented in the d/changelog
   [x] I reviewed all changes and I approve them
   [x] attach debdiff against the package in (old)stable
   [~] the issue is verified as fixed in unstable

[ Changes ]
There are three patches here:

1. 05-fix-AMD-ucode-checking-in-non-debug-mode.patch - fixes a bug
    where AMD microcode checks would fail unless -v is passed
2. 06-uCode-fix-uninitialized-value-in-logging-of-processo.patch - fix
    uninitialized variable error, required for the other patches to
    work
3. 07-mark-unavailable-firmware-as-CURRENT.patch - do not mark
    unavailable firmware as "UNKNOWN"

The first and second patches have shipped into unstable with the -6
release, the last patch is pending.

[ Other info ]

anarcat@angela:dist$ debdiff needrestart_3.6-4.dsc 
needrestart_3.6-4+deb12u1.dsc| diffstat
dpkg-source: warning: extracting unsigned source package 
(/home/anarcat/dist/needrestart_3.6-4+deb12u1.dsc)
  changelog                                                             |    6
  patches/05-fix-AMD-ucode-checking-in-non-debug-mode.patch             |   33 
+++++
  patches/06-uCode-fix-uninitialized-value-in-logging-of-processo.patch |   30 
++++
  patches/07-mark-unavailable-firmware-as-CURRENT.patch                 |   61 
++++++++++
  patches/series                                                        |    3
  5 files changed, 133 insertions(+)


We might also want to consider updating to the unstable version
directly, as the patch is relatively similar, in fact it's currently
*smaller* because it's lacking the third patch here:

anarcat@angela:dist[1]$ debdiff needrestart_3.6-4.dsc needrestart_3.6-6.dsc | 
diffstat
  NEWS                                                                 |    8 --
  changelog                                                            |   26 
+++++++
  control                                                              |    1
  patches/05-fix-AMD-ucode-checking-in-non-debug-mode.diff             |   33 
++++++++++
  patches/06-uCode-fix-uninitialized-value-in-logging-of-processo.diff |   30 
+++++++++
  patches/series                                                       |    2
  6 files changed, 91 insertions(+), 9 deletions(-)

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