On Tue, 2012-06-12 at 08:34 -0300, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote: > On Mon, 11 Jun 2012, Daniel Baumann wrote: > > On 06/10/2012 04:31 PM, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote: > > > The microcode data file for Linux contains the latest microcode definitions > > > for all AMD AMD64 processors. > > > > i'm aware that there's the intel-microcode package, however, why not > > integrate this into firmware-nonfree (as firmware-amd-microcode or > > something) and keep all this stuff at one place? > > intel-microcode will be some trouble to integrate, at least at this > time, so I'd rather not do it for Wheezy. amd64-microcode could be > integrated into firmware-nonfree without trouble. > > However, amd64-microcode has a different upstream, and it would already > have to generate a separate binary package anyway for license reasons, > so what is the point of adding it to firmware-nonfree? We're gradually moving towards having linux-firmware.git as the upstream for firmware-nonfree, so ideally this microcode would first be added there and then to firmware-nonfree. (I assume you're aware that microcode updates are now requested with request_firmware() so no special scripting is required any more.) > We could make firmware-nonfree "recommend intel-microcode | > amd64-microcode" on [i386, amd64], though. That sounds like a good > idea to help people install the microcode updates. This is wrong because: 1. There is no such binary package. 2. Architecture restrictions are applied at build time on arch:any packages, but don't work at all on arch:all packages. 3. Package managers would install intel-microcode, regardless of which vendor made their CPU. Maybe the thing to do is to create another metapackage (#522415) that depends on all of this. Or redefine firmware-linux to be that package. > After all, just about every new Intel and AMD processor has microcode > patches issued, and both people and vendors are still as bad as they > have always been at keeping their BIOS/EFI up-to-date... Ben. -- Ben Hutchings Computers are not intelligent. They only think they are.
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