Intel Microcode Boot Loader

On January 3, 2018, security researchers announced the discovery of two security vulnerabilities affecting all processors: Meltdown and Spectre. While Meltdown can be addressed via OS patch, Spectre required microcode update. Since the microcode is loaded automatically by the BIOS/UEFI, motherboard vendors required to issue an update. However, vendors normally release firmware updates only to their recent products.

Software developer Regeneration came up with a global workaround to problem. Introducing the Intel Microcode Boot Loader, based on Intel's BIOS Implementation Test Suite (BITS). Users no longer need to modify BIOS/UEFI ROMs to update to the latest microcode to stay protected from security vulnerabilities (like Spectre), bugs and erratas. However, this solution requires a permanently plugged USB flash drive with at least 25MB and BIOS/UEFI supporting boot from USB devices.

Instructions: 1. Format a USB flash drive with FAT32 filesystem. 2. Extract the archive to the USB flash drive and run install.exe to make it bootable. 3. Enter the BIOS/UEFI, assign the USB flash drive as the 1st boot device and enable legacy boot mode. 4. The boot loader will regularly update the microcode and load the OS.

Notes: This release includes the latest ucodes for 392 Intel CPUs produced from 1996 to 2018. The ucodes are stored in the \boot\mcudb folder if you wish to update in the future. If you get 'Ucode not found' warning during installation, or plan to deploy on another PC, look for the correct ucode (by CPUID) in \boot\mcudb and copy it to \boot\mcu.