I have a system with an AMD Ryzen 9 CPU and AMD Radeon RX 6800 GPU running Debian 12. Today there is a security update recommended for the intel-microcode. Checking for updates reveals my system believes it needs the update, but I am not informed enough to understand why/if that is true. I managed to find a Debian article on microcode and it seems to indicate it is specific to either intel or AMD. Should I trust the system update and follow through? I’m hoping someone can shed some light on this. My proficiency with Debian is likely not where it needs to be it seems.
The system packages don’t adapt to your hardware. If you take your os drive out and stick it in another computer, you won’t need to mess around making sure the CPU works properly. Unless you added more repositories, all your updates are coming from the same place, to trust any is to trust all.
an exception to that is the initramfs that the bootloader uses. its creator adapts it to your system so that it can be smaller.