Recently on
runit-20220123 plasma-discover "advised" ::) me to update 3 packages:
- amd-ucode
- linux-firmware
- linux-firmware-whence
- Are they necesssary on an Intel laptop (https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c05226636)? If not, should uninstall them?
- And most importantly can any of them result in such a surprise (https://forum.artixlinux.org/index.php/topic,387.msg3082.html#msg3082)?
I installed them on my pentium single board minix and they have done no harm as far as i can tell. that is all i know.
If you have Intel CPU, they have their own microcode package, which could cause the problems like you linked if there's something wrong with a particular version; meanwhile, installing amd-ucode shouldn't make any difference apart from a small HDD space waste. linux-firmware-whence (https://archlinux.org/packages/core/any/linux-firmware-whence/) seems to contain the license files only, and therefore is also harmless. As for linux-firmware, it contains the firmware binary blobs: some devices could run blobless, others won't work without blobs at all, others may work with a limited functionality (i.e. if they have an older version of blob stored in their ROM). So, the difference from installing a linux-firmware package - depends on your hardware configuration.