Messages in this thread | | | From | (Måns Rullgård) | Subject | Re: Loading Pentium III microcode under Linux - catch 22! | Date | Thu, 07 Aug 2003 15:04:28 +0200 |
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Chris Rankin <rankincj@yahoo.com> writes:
> 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.
If the microcode in the CPUs is buggy, they are faulty and you should demand to get them replaced at no cost.
> 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?
I guess it would be possible to compile the microcode into the kernel and have some code in arch/i386/* load it as early as possible. As long as you don't distribute the compiled kernel you should be fine wrt licensing.
-- Måns Rullgård mru@users.sf.net
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