microcode driver fails on PIII-Celeron

The microcode driver in the kernel fails for me on my laptop with
a PIII-era Celeron 900. I've tested both 2.4 and 2.5 kernels over course of a year or so; all abort with the same error when trying to load the microcode:

microcode: CPU0 no microcode found! (sig=68a, pflags=32)

My amateur reading of the code leads me to think the processor
might be misidentified somehow (or something, my head doesn't like bit operations).

/proc/cpuinfo:
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 8
model name : Celeron (Coppermine)
stepping : 10
cpu MHz : 897.366
cache size : 128 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse
bogomips : 1773.56

FWIW, this is a Debian unstable system, using the microcode
utilities as packaged for Debian. The laptop is a Dell Inspiron 2500, based on the i815 chipset.

Is this a bug, or is this really not supposed to work?

--
Joseph Fannin
[email protected]

"That's all I have to say about that." -- Forrest Gump.

This is not a bug. It simply means that there is no microcode data for your processor. So, I recommend disabling invocation of microcode_ctl on startup until there is a latest set of microcode data which contains a chunk for your cpu (i.e. until your cpu has some bugs worthy of fixing :)

Regards
Tigran

Quoted 43 lines · Joseph Fannin

The microcode driver in the kernel fails for me on my laptop with
a PIII-era Celeron 900. I've tested both 2.4 and 2.5 kernels over course of a year or so; all abort with the same error when trying to load the microcode:

microcode: CPU0 no microcode found! (sig=68a, pflags=32)

My amateur reading of the code leads me to think the processor
might be misidentified somehow (or something, my head doesn't like bit operations).

/proc/cpuinfo:
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 8
model name : Celeron (Coppermine)
stepping : 10
cpu MHz : 897.366
cache size : 128 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse
bogomips : 1773.56

FWIW, this is a Debian unstable system, using the microcode
utilities as packaged for Debian. The laptop is a Dell Inspiron 2500, based on the i815 chipset.

Is this a bug, or is this really not supposed to work?

--
Joseph Fannin
[email protected]

"That's all I have to say about that." -- Forrest Gump.