Re: [PATCH] x86/microcode: Update microcode for all cores in parallel

From: Borislav Petkov
Date: Sat Aug 24 2019 - 04:52:09 EST


On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 11:43:47PM +0300, Mihai Carabas wrote:
> From: Ashok Raj <ashok.raj@xxxxxxxxx>
>
> Microcode update was changed to be serialized due to restrictions after
> Spectre days. Updating serially on a large multi-socket system can be
> painful since we do this one CPU at a time. Cloud customers have expressed
> discontent as services disappear for a prolonged time. The restriction is
> that only one core goes through the update while other cores are quiesced.
> The update is now done only on the first thread of each core while other
> siblings simply wait for this to complete.
>
> Signed-off-by: Ashok Raj <ashok.raj@xxxxxxxxx>
> Signed-off-by: Mihai Carabas <mihai.carabas@xxxxxxxxxx>
> ---
> arch/x86/kernel/cpu/microcode/core.c | 44 ++++++++++++++++++++++++-----------
> arch/x86/kernel/cpu/microcode/intel.c | 14 ++++-------
> 2 files changed, 36 insertions(+), 22 deletions(-)

Thanks, I did some cleaning up and smoke testing. It looks ok so far.
The versions I'm going to hammer on more - and I'd appreciate it if you
did so too, when possible - as a reply to this message.

--
Regards/Gruss,
Boris.

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