Re: Intel And Kenrel Programming

[Samuli Suonpaa <suonpaa@iki.fi>]

Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> writes:
> For example the O(1) scheduler will trigger very occasional random
> crashes or reboots with early PII Xeon microcode sets. I'm sure
> Debian has a package for this somewhere.

Something like this, I guess:

$ apt-cache show microcode.ctl
Package: microcode.ctl
[...]
Description: Intel IA32 CPU Microcode Utility
 The microcode_ctl utility is a companion to the IA32 microcode driver
 written by Tigran Aivazian <tigran@veritas.com>. The utility has two
 uses:
 .
 a) it decodes and sends new microcode to the kernel driver to be
    uploaded to Intel IA32 family processors. (Pentium Pro, PII,
    Celeron, PIII, Xeon, Pentium 4 etc.)
 b) it signals the kernel driver to release any buffers it may hold
 .
 The microcode update is volatile and needs to be uploaded on each
 system boot i.e. it doesn't re-flash your CPU permanently, reboot and
 it reverts back to the old microcode. The ideal place to load
 microcode is in BIOS, but most vendors never update it!
 .
 To enable microcode update, I need some kernel support, thus I need
 the linux kernel 2.2.18 or later, or 2.4.0 or later.

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