[Beowulf] cursed (and perhaps blessed) Intel microcode

[Christopher Samuel]

Hi Mark,

On 30/03/18 16:28, Chris Samuel wrote:

> I'll try and nudge a person I know there on that...

They did some prodding, and finally new firmware emerged at the end of
last month.

/tmp/microcode-20180425$ iucode_tool -L intel-ucode-with-caveats/06-4f-01
microcode bundle 1: intel-ucode-with-caveats/06-4f-01
   01/001: sig 0x000406f1, pf mask 0xef, 2018-03-21, rev 0xb00002c, size 
27648

note the *with-caveats* part.

The releasenote file says:

-------------------8< snip snip 8<-------------------

-- intel-ucode-with-caveats/ --
This directory holds microcode that might need special handling.
BDX-ML microcode is provided in directory, because it need special 
commits in
the Linux kernel, otherwise, updating it might result in unexpected system
behavior.

OS vendors must ensure that the late loader patches (provided in
linux-kernel-patches\) are included in the distribution before packaging the
BDX-ML microcode for late-loading.

-------------------8< snip snip 8<-------------------

Here be dragons..

Good luck!
Chris
-- 
  Chris Samuel  :  http://www.csamuel.org/  :  Melbourne, VIC