Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 7 Aug 2003 16:57:19 +0100 (BST) | From | Tigran Aivazian <> | Subject | Re: Loading Pentium III microcode under Linux - catch 22! |
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On 7 Aug 2003, Alan Cox wrote: > > 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? > > The kernel can't load the microcode until it has booted, it can > load it very early after that from initrd.
Well, it could even do it a little bit earlier, i.e. if we allowed linking microcode data into the kernel image (as some scsi firmware data is, etc and as __initdata so it's thrown away later) then it could update it very very early, i.e. even before mounting the root filesystem. All it needs is the ability to do IPIs and get the data from somewhere.
I could implement this, but if you tell me that this is not allowed because of the GPL issues (microcode data chunks are copyrighted by Intel) then obviously I won't waste time writing the code to do this.
Alternatively, yes, he can do it from within initrd. Hope that is early enough for him.
Kind regards Tigran
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