[hansendc]

The AVX disable is only when you use "gather_data_sampling=force". The default is to leave AVX alone and proclaim the system to be vulnerable.

From https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... :

> Specifying "gather_data_sampling=force" will use the microcode mitigation when > available or disable AVX on affected systems where the microcode hasn't been > updated to include the mitigation.

Disclaimer: I work on Linux at Intel. I probably wrote or tweaked the documentation and changelogs that are confusing folks.

[kzrdude]

Great, thanks for the clarification