Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S275320AbTHGNHl (ORCPT ); Thu, 7 Aug 2003 09:07:41 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S275314AbTHGNHk (ORCPT ); Thu, 7 Aug 2003 09:07:40 -0400 Received: from main.gmane.org ([80.91.224.249]:49584 "EHLO main.gmane.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S275320AbTHGNHj (ORCPT ); Thu, 7 Aug 2003 09:07:39 -0400 X-Injected-Via-Gmane: http://gmane.org/ To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org From: mru@users.sourceforge.net (=?iso-8859-1?q?M=E5ns_Rullg=E5rd?=) Subject: Re: Loading Pentium III microcode under Linux - catch 22! Date: Thu, 07 Aug 2003 15:04:28 +0200 Message-ID: References: <20030807122850.99548.qmail@web40611.mail.yahoo.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Complaints-To: usenet@main.gmane.org User-Agent: Gnus/5.1002 (Gnus v5.10.2) XEmacs/21.4 (Rational FORTRAN, linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:13wcYJBMtCXvqoCCmTv0is5LA5I= Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1658 Lines: 34 Chris Rankin 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. -- M?ns Rullg?rd mru@users.sf.net - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/