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    SubjectLoading Pentium III microcode under Linux - catch 22!
    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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