intel-microcode (3.20140913.1) unstable; urgency=low This release drops support for automatically applying microcode updates without a reboot. The microcode updates can still be applied without a reboot through manual action of the system administrator, at his own risk. Microcodes known to be dangerous have been renamed so that they will not be found by the kernel. This is a reactive blacklisting: it is unlikely to be complete at any point in time. The 3.x branch of the intel-microcode packages will only support Linux kernels v3.10 and above. For older kernels, you must use the 1.x branch of the intel-microcode packages. Refer to /usr/share/doc/intel-microcode/README.Debian for details. -- Henrique de Moraes Holschuh Fri, 10 Oct 2014 12:27:57 -0300 intel-microcode (1.20130222.3) unstable; urgency=low This release adds support for early microcode updates on Linux kernel v3.9 and later. It requires the kernel support for the feature to be compiled in, the use of an initramfs, and also recent versions of the iucode-tool and initramfs-tools packages. Early microcode updates greatly reduce the chances of system malfunction due to any issues that are corrected by the microcode update. The microcode will be updated while the kernel initializes the boot processor, and before any other processors (in a multicore system) are enabled. -- Henrique de Moraes Holschuh Wed, 19 Jun 2013 22:03:30 -0300 intel-microcode (1.20120606.4) unstable; urgency=low The initramfs logic to automatically restrict the microcodes that have to be installed using iucode-tool can fail in a very specific situation when the intel-microcode package is installed for the first time at the same time the _currently running_ kernel is being upgraded. intel-microcode will warn you should that happen, and will install all microcodes, resulting in a much larger initramfs image than expected. If you did hit this failure mode and you believe the large initramfs will cause problems for your system to reboot, please remove the intel-microcode package to reduce the initramfs size, reboot to load the upgraded kernel, and then reinstall the intel-microcode package. Once the intel-microcode package is installed, it will cooperate with the kernel packages and automatically avoid the issue on future upgrades. -- Henrique de Moraes Holschuh Sat, 11 Aug 2012 19:02:20 -0300 intel-microcode (1.20120606.1) unstable; urgency=low This major release update changes how Debian handles Intel system processor microcode updates. Initscripts and the old microcode.ctl utility are not used to load microcode anymore. Previously, microcode.ctl would be used to read the text file distributed by Intel (microcode.dat), convert it to binary, and upload to /dev/cpu/microcode. This functionality has been deprecated in the kernel upstream for a long time, the firmware loader and a sysfs interface should be used instead. The Intel microcode.dat file is now preprocessed using iucode-tool when the intel-microcode package is built, and the resulting binary data files for /lib/firmware/intel-ucode are shipped, ready for use by the kernel. The intel-microcode package now provides automation for autoloading microcode from the initramfs, instead of relying on any initscripts. Refer to the README files in /usr/share/ doc/intel-microcode for more details; there is some limited support for /usr/share/misc/ intel-microcode.dat files. If you don't use an initramfs for a custom-built kernel, please make sure the microcode driver is a module, and to load it at a time /lib/firmware is already available. Adding it to /etc/modules is usually enough. In this specific case, /usr/share/misc/ intel-microcode.dat is not supported, refer to the README files for more detail. WARNING: if you have an old /usr/share/misc/intel-microcode.dat file, it may cause problems because of the way Intel does microcode release management. As a rule, it is best to remove outdated microcode.dat files from the system. -- Henrique de Moraes Holschuh Tue, 10 Jul 2012 16:06:06 -0300