On Mon, 13 Aug 2012, Paul Menzel wrote: > Looking into this some more, this seems unlikely in Debian because the > microcode packages are in non-free [1] and therefore not available for > Debian users not having enabled non-free repositories. > > Because of that the microcode packages are also non-essential, that > means not installed by default even when non-free packages are allowed. > And normal users will never install them by themselves. > > So currently I am pretty sure 99,9999 % of Debian users do not have it > installed.
That is correct, yes. We may change the Debian installer to offer to install the microcode packages for AMD and/or Intel to users that enable non-free. We could also document the availability of the microcode packages in the release documentation, I suppose. But Debian really isn't big on the non-free stuff. > > With the latest mainline kernel the microcode driver should be automatically > > loaded by CPUID probing through udev. > > How can I find out, if the microcode provided by my BIOS is older than > the one provided by the processor vendor? I am pretty sure, that for > example Intel does not release any updates for the Celeron CPU in my > ASUS Eee PC 701 4G. The easiest way, by far, is to attempt to update to the latest microcode in the microcode distribution. Assuming you're using Debian testing/unstable, install the intel-microcode package (in unstable, install also package iucode-tool to avoid bloating the initramfs). Then grep for "microcode" in the kernel logs. The 3.2 kernel will log the fact that it had to update the processor microcode. If it doesn't log anything, either no microcode for that processor model is available, or you're already running newer microcode. In Debian stable, it works the same way but I am not sure the kernel will log anything of value. If you want to do it the hard way: "iucode-tool --scan-system" will tell you your processor's signature (requires the cpuid module to be loaded first). If you're running Debian stable, wait a few days for the Squeeze backport to hit the mirrors. You can get the pf_mask and current version of microcode on each core from /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/microcode/, and you can check the intel-microcode package changelog for your processor's signature to see if a higher revision is available. -- "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot Henrique Holschuh -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-kernel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20120813163215.ga3...@khazad-dum.debian.net
