On Sun, 08 Sep 2013, Joel Rees wrote: > I was hoping that AMD was not going to have the license and > non-visibility issue that plagues the Intel processor microcode > updates. But I find this original announcement from when Henrique made > the updater tool available: > > http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/11/msg00109.html
AMD is better than Intel at telling the general public what a microcode update fixes. AMD does publish to the general public the errata each microcode update fixes. What each erratum means is also published in the AMD processor "Revision Guides", which are also public. Not that it will help you much. Really. Most of the errata worth fixing through a microcode update causes either unpredictable system behaviour, data corruption, or system hangs/reboots. Only a few fixes are for "minor" issues such as power management, performance, or optional features. And most of the time, it is very very difficult to access how difficult it is to hit a given erratum. So it is a "update or else" deal, because it always fixes something horrible (even when the chances of you hitting the issue are very remote -- but you won't be able to know that, you'll have to update just in case anyway) AFAIK, Intel does publish the same kind of information but it is not available to the general public. Intel does publish to the general public the list of errata in their processor "specification updates" documentation, it just almost never writes down in public documentation what errata a microcode update fixes. And you could also have internal/non-public errata and fixes, nothing forces Intel, AMD, or any other vendor to disclose (even to their hardware partners) the full list of errata and behaviour changes (fixes, etc). Note that even the internal errata/fix information is bound to be really uninteresting anyway. Backdoors would not be documented anywhere, heck, it is very likely that only the one or two engineers that had to implement them even know about it. -- "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot Henrique Holschuh -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130908155505.gb5...@khazad-dum.debian.net