[LinuxBIOS] Intel refactoring and microcode updates

[Carl-Daniel Hailfinger]

On 11.01.2008 02:33, Corey Osgood wrote:
> joe at smittys.pointclark.net wrote:
>   
>> Quoting Corey Osgood <corey.osgood at gmail.com>:
>>     
>>> Do you mean the microcode files? If so, the microcode update looks like
>>> this:
>>>
>>> Header
>>> Update Revision
>>> Date
>>> Processor Signature (CPU ID)
>>> ...
>>>
>>> So, the 4th entry in the update is always the CPU ID, and conveniently
>>> it's always the last one on the first line. It also makes grepping for
>>> them very easy, once you have the update broken down into smaller files.
>>> This is documented *somewhere* in LB, but I can't find it at the moment.
>>> It's also in the Intel architecture manual, volume 3a, table 9-6.
>>>
>>> In the past we labeled some CPU IDs as to what CPUs they belonged to. In
>>> truth, Intel uses the same CPU IDs for a variety of CPUs, for instance
>>> in some cases Celeron, Pentium X, and Xeons all share a common ID, since
>>> the core is still the same. So we can't really do that any more ;)
>>>
>>>       
>> Oh ok, that makes sense.
>>
>> Acked-by: Joseph Smith <joe at smittys.pointclark.net>
>>     
> Thanks, Joe. Anyone else have anything to say? Honestly expected more
> feedback, but if there are no objections I'll commit it tomorrow.
>
> The other thing I forgot to mention was that all the data on CPU IDs
> came from the existing code and this site:
> http://processorfinder.intel.com. Some of them are a bit unclear on what
> sockets they use, but if anything comes up wrong, we can easily correct it.
>   

Do you see any way to solve the "size problem" for sockets with too many
different cores? It would also be interesting to find out if your work
on stripping duplicate contents gives us new opportunities to reduce
size even further.

Regards,
Carl-Daniel