[coreboot] blobs: is there a reason for intel microcode version 20150121?

[Zoran Stojsavljevic]

> I know very little about it really. It may well be potentially bad to
simply use the latest version,
> but in case it's really only because nobody did it, I might prepare a
patch to use
> downloadmirror.intel.com/27337/eng/microcode-20171117.tgz instead
(someday, after
> I testing it on my device).

To understand what is really going on, I did the following investigation on
my only coreboot clone version,
I have on my current SSD the following: WIN10, using VMware® Workstation 12
Player, version  12.5.8 build-7098237
with Fedora 26 VM, where the coreboot is located.

CLI transcript follows:

*[user at localhost coreboot]$ pwd*
*/home/user/projects/coreboot/coreboot*
*[user at localhost coreboot]$ git describe*
*4.5-1006-gef7e98a2ac*
*[user at localhost coreboot]$ grep -r 20150121 **
*3rdparty/blobs/cpu/intel/microcode/update-microcodes.sh:MICROCODE_VERSION=20150121*
*[user at localhost coreboot]$ cd 3rdparty/blobs/cpu/intel/microcode*
*[user at localhost microcode]$ ls -al*
*total 24*
*drwxrwxr-x.  2 user user 12288 Nov 21 12:27 .*
*drwxrwxr-x. 24 user user  4096 Feb 18  2017 ..*
*-rwxrwxr-x.  1 user user  1782 Feb 18  2017 microcode2bin.sh*
*-rwxrwxr-x.  1 user user  2989 Nov 21 12:27 update-microcodes.sh*
*[user at localhost microcode]$ tail -10 update-microcodes.sh *
*}*

*get_microcode*
*separate_microcode*
*move_microcode*
*dump_cpuids <<=========================== I added this line of code to see
which CPUIDs's MCUs are added here: *

*rm -f $MICROCODE_ARCHIVE*
*rm -f $MICROCODE_FILE*

*[user at localhost microcode]$ *

Now, you can substitute 20150121.tgz with 20171117
<http://downloadmirror.intel.com/27337/eng/microcode-20171117.tgz>.tgz in
bash shell script update-microcodes.sh and see what will happen?!

I somehow hope this exercise is helpful.

Zoran

On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 9:31 AM, Martin Kepplinger <martink at posteo.de>
wrote:

> Since there are many releases of Intel's cpu microcode since 2015-01, I
> was wondering if
> there's a reason why coreboot, if at all, uses this one.
>
> I know very little about it really. It may well be potentially bad to
> simply use the latest version,
> but in case it's really only because nobody did it, I might prepare a
> patch to use
> downloadmirror.intel.com/27337/eng/microcode-20171117.tgz instead
> (someday, after
> I testing it on my device).
>
> thanks
>                                          martin
>
>
> --
> coreboot mailing list: coreboot at coreboot.org
> https://mail.coreboot.org/mailman/listinfo/coreboot
>
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