From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S266897AbUHOU6x (ORCPT ); Sun, 15 Aug 2004 16:58:53 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S266899AbUHOU6x (ORCPT ); Sun, 15 Aug 2004 16:58:53 -0400 Received: from zero.aec.at ([193.170.194.10]:40197 "EHLO zero.aec.at") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S266897AbUHOU6w (ORCPT ); Sun, 15 Aug 2004 16:58:52 -0400 To: Danny van Dyk cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [RFC] Microcode Update Driver for AMD K8 CPUs References: <2tvqK-3rv-7@gated-at.bofh.it> From: Andi Kleen Date: Sun, 15 Aug 2004 22:58:48 +0200 In-Reply-To: <2tvqK-3rv-7@gated-at.bofh.it> (Danny van Dyk's message of "Sun, 15 Aug 2004 17:50:06 +0200") Message-ID: User-Agent: Gnus/5.110003 (No Gnus v0.3) Emacs/21.2 (gnu/linux) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Danny van Dyk writes: > I recently found some piece of code [1] to perform a microcode update > on AMD's K8 CPUs. It included some update blocks hardcoded into the > module. Several people found this code (including me). But I don't think it's a good idea right now to merge because it is better to leave these things to the BIOS. It's unlikely that AMD will regularly release "open" microcode updates anyways, and moving them between BIOSes seems a bit dangerous to me (often you likely need to change some magic MSRs too or you could have some side effects). Overall it seems to be too dangerous to do in a standard kernel. Also I suspect the driver won't work very well on SMP. -Andi