Earlier today, Microsoft released its Patch Tuesday updates for Windows 10 (KB5028166) and Windows 11(KB5028185). The company, on its health dashboard website, made an accompanying announcement to explain that it has deployed its second phase hardening against the BlackLotus UEFI bootkit security flaw (Interestingly, the source code leaked too, almost simultaneously).
The latest update adds the newest SafeOS Dynamic Update packages for WinRE (KB5028312, KB5028314 on Windows 11, and KB5028311 on Windows 10), and brings easier automated deployment of Secure Boot DBX revocation files. The Secure Boot Forbidden Signature Database or Secure Boot DBX from Microsoft is basically a block-list for blacklisted UEFI executables that were found to be dangerous. Microsoft also revoked several WHQL-signed drivers that were actually malware with the latest Patch Tuesday.
And there is more good news. The latest Patch Tuesday also fixes a mouse stuttering issue which was a result of a conflict of Windows 11 with high polling rates of mice. Microsoft had already announced previously that it had addressed the issue in its comprehensive yearly performance report. Microsoft explained:
The Windows input stack was being pushed to its limits with high report rate mice and their input being delivered to not just the game, but also multiple background processes. In turn, that caused a significant amount of time processing input rather than providing as many cycles as possible for rendering the game experience.
We set out to reduce the amount of processing time it took to handle input requests by throttling and coalescing background raw mouse listeners and capping their message rate. Prior to these changes, we observed on a Surface Laptop Studio with a 1000 Hz mouse, a test bed of background listeners, and popular games that there was significant stutter. After the improvements, on the same setup, we now deliver a smooth, uninterrupted gaming experience and preserve the low latency, high precision input experience in games while being efficient with input for background listeners!
Microsoft first delivered the update via the Windows 11 preview update at the end of last month build 22621.1928 ( KB5027303). The release note says "New! This update improves your computer’s performance when you use a mouse that has a high report rate for gaming."
