Re: AMD microcode loading broken on 32 bit

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 23 January 2014, Boris Ostrovsky wrote:
>On 01/21/2014 01:25 PM, Borislav Petkov wrote:
>> On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 12:55:53PM -0500, Boris Ostrovsky wrote:
>>>          cat $(AMD_UCODE_PATH)/* >
>>> 
>>> ucode_initrd/kernel/x86/microcode/AuthenticAMD.bin
>>> 
>>>          (cd ucode_initrd;find . | cpio -o -H newc >
>>> 
>>> ../$(DISTDIR)/common/ucode_initrd.cpio)
>>> 
>>>          ...
>>>          cat $(DISTDIR)/common/ucode_initrd.cpio \
>>>          
>>>              $(DISTDIR)/common/_initramfs.cpio.gz > \
>>>              $(DISTDIR)/common/initramfs.cpio.gz
>>> 
>>> and as I just discovered, with a little twist: apparently
>>> AMD_UCODE_PATH points to Intel microcode.
>> 
>> LOL!
>> 
>> @hpa: in case you were wondering whether Intel ucode works on AMD - it
>> doesn't! :-)
>> 
>>> So we clearly screwed up on our end but I'd think that we shouldn't
>>> crash when this happens.
>> 
>> Yes, we shouldn't. I'll try to reproduce it here.
>
>So I tried this on a "good" system and I am pretty sure this is broken.
>I don't
>have any microcode in initrd and I am still dying in
>load_microcode_amd().

You can find the code on AMD's web site if you look carefully, or at least 
I was able to some years ago when I built this box.  There s/b an installer 
that lives in /etc/init.d, and the code itself normally lives in the 
/lib/firmware/amd-ucode/ directory.

If its working correctly you should see something resembling this in your 
dmsg with:
gene@coyote$ grep microcode  /var/log/dmesg
[   22.572212] microcode: CPU0: patch_level=0x01000065
[   22.573242] microcode: CPU0: new patch_level=0x01000083
[   22.573256] microcode: CPU1: patch_level=0x01000065
[   22.573263] microcode: CPU1: new patch_level=0x01000083
[   22.573273] microcode: CPU2: patch_level=0x01000065
[   22.573281] microcode: CPU2: new patch_level=0x01000083
[   22.573293] microcode: CPU3: patch_level=0x01000065
[   22.573301] microcode: CPU3: new patch_level=0x01000083
[   22.573377] microcode: Microcode Update Driver: v2.00 
<tigran@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Peter Oruba

That was from a bootup to 3.12.6, 32 bit PAE, on a quad core phenom.

Cheers, Gene
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