AMD releases new Windows 11/10 chipset driver for Ryzen 9000, 8000, 7000, 5000, 3000, more

Today, AMD has released a new chipset driver, version 6.10.17.152. The major highlight of the release is the addition of Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) Shadow Stack compatibility support for several of the chipset components as the respective driver executables have now been marked with Microsoft's "/CETCOMPAT" linker.

For those who may not be familiar with it, Microsoft introduced CETCOMPAT to indicate compatibility with CET. It essentially brings hardware-enforced stack protection to protect against control flow hijacking and it was on Windows 10 20H1 when it was first debuted.

CET introduces Shadow Stack and Indirect Branch Targeting (IBT) features. The former helps defend a system against Return Oriented Programming (ROP) attacks while the latter protects against Call or Jump Oriented Programming (COP/JOP) attacks.

CET is able to do so by checking the normal program stack against a hardware-stored copy (the Shadow Stack) to ensure that the integrity of return addresses is maintained. In simple words, Shadow Stack stops malware from taking over the process steps of legitimate software as it flags potentially compromised software from executing.

AMD Ryzen CPUs since Zen 3 or Ryzen 5000 series have supported the Shadow Stack feature. Thus, newer Ryzen 6000 (Zen 3+), Ryzen 7000 (Zen 4) and Ryzen 9000 (Zen 5) are also compatible.

Meanwhile, to guard against indirect branch target injection attacks, AMD CPUs support Indirect branch prediction barrier (IBPB), Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS), and Single Thread Indirect Branch Predictor (STIBP). On Windows, the company typically recommends using IBPB. However, AMD Ryzen CPUs may not support IBT fully.

Aside from CET support, the new chipset update also brings several bug fixes and new device ID additions. Sadly, AMD has not been able to resolve the failed uninstallation bug as it still remains in the known issues section. The Ryzen ppkg (provisioning package) install/upgrade bug persists as well.

The full changelog is given below:

Release Highlights

• New program support added.

• CETCOMPACT support was added for a few drivers for Windows 11.
• Bug fixes.

Known Issues

• Some driver names on a non-English OS may appear in English.
• The uninstall summary may incorrectly display the uninstall status as Failed. 
• Occasionally, Ryzen PPKG may not install/upgrade.

The full breakdown of the changes in the various chipset components is given in the table below.

Some of the drivers like Ryzen power plans and PCI device driver, among others, have not seen any change. Others like General Purpose I/O (GPIO), Micro PEP (Platform Extension Plug-in), PMF (Platform Management Framework), I2C (Inter-Integrated Circuit), and UART (Universal Asynchronous Receiver-Transmitter), have all received CETCOMPAT support.

Another noteworthy thing is that the 3D V-cache performance optimizer driver also has no change currently despite the upcoming launch of Ryzen 9000 X3D CPUs.

You can download the driver from here on AMD's official website. Do note that the driver no longer supports Windows 10 on the latest generation of AMD mobile chips.