Dear Andi, thank you for your response. Am Sonntag, den 12.08.2012, 06:10 -0700 schrieb Andi Kleen: > On Sat, Aug 11, 2012 at 03:17:19PM +0200, Paul Menzel wrote: > > > This really depends on what operations you want to do, and how buggy the > > > CPU microcode installed by the BIOS is. If you care that much about it, > > > you can blacklist it. > > > > Understood. Although I do not understand from where the updated > > microcode is fetched. The only way for desktop users were BIOS upgrades > > if I remember correctly. Linux does not ship the microcode, does not it. > > > > So I do not see what purpose this module has for desktop users. > > Intel regularly releases microcode updates and distributions are supposed to do > regular package updates with the latest microcode file. You should > get those with your normal update mechanism. > > In general it's recommended to run with the latest microcode. Looking into this some more, this seems unlikely in Debian because the microcode packages are in non-free [1] and therefore not available for Debian users not having enabled non-free repositories. Because of that the microcode packages are also non-essential, that means not installed by default even when non-free packages are allowed. And normal users will never install them by themselves. So currently I am pretty sure 99,9999 % of Debian users do not have it installed. > With the latest mainline kernel the microcode driver should be automatically > loaded by CPUID probing through udev. How can I find out, if the microcode provided by my BIOS is older than the one provided by the processor vendor? I am pretty sure, that for example Intel does not release any updates for the Celeron CPU in my ASUS Eee PC 701 4G. Thanks, Paul [1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=intel-microcode;dist=unstable
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