Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 7 Aug 2003 13:28:50 +0100 (BST) | From | Chris Rankin <> | Subject | Loading Pentium III microcode under Linux - catch 22! |
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Tigran,
I have an i840 motherboard with a pair of 933 MHz PIII Coppermine CPUs, and I use your microcode driver to load the latest Intel microcode into my CPUs. This is very important because these CPUs are buggy without their microcode, and I would prefer to have the BIOS load it except that this would prevent me from booting into memtest. I have tried this before - memtest crashes with an "Unexpected Interrupt" error after a few minutes. (No i840 workarounds enabled?) Since I suspect that DOS would do the same thing and I would boot into DOS to flash firmware, I have decided that crashes like this would be a Bad Thing.
I have modified by boot scripts to load the microcode as soon as the root filesystem has been successfully mounted. However, this means that kernel always boots on buggy CPUs! For example, last night my boot failed just after releasing the unused kernel memory. I suspect that the record temperatures that my part of the world is currently experiencing is adversely influencing things. My boot-ups are usually fine.
In an ideal world, I would like Linux to load the microcode *before* the kernel boots, which begs the question of "How?". Can you suggest anything, please? I remember talk of boot-time RAM disks, and wondered if the microcode could be placed on one of these somehow? Or would that be ruled out immediately by the microcode's non-GPL nature?
Any suggestions gratefully received, Thanks, Chris Rankin
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