On Thu, 2008-07-03 at 06:56 -0700, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
Actually there are three:
1. The text format 'microcode.dat', including updates for all CPUs.
2. The binary format output by microcode_ctl, still including all CPUs.
3. The smaller files with just the relevant subset of #2.
The kernel (since 2006) can actually take either #2 or #3. The udev
scripts I just posted will use microcode_ctl to feed it #2, when they
find #1 on the file system.
A small amount of extra work in the userspace tool would let those udev
scripts feed #3 to the kernel, and then the code in the kernel to select
the appropriate update could be removed.
Doesn't the "new format" (#3) involve hard links too, since there are
some cases where the same microcode update applies to more than one CPU
revision?
Do we really need to _ship_ it in a different form? It's not exactly
hard to convert from the text form (#1) to either of the other two --
either on the fly in udev scripts, or at installation time.
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dwmw2
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