On 25/01/2018 17:15, Paul wrote:
Brian Gregory wrote:
On 22/01/2018 02:41, Paul wrote:
Brian Gregory wrote:
On 21/01/2018 23:54, Brian Gregory wrote:
On 21/01/2018 21:49, Paul wrote:
Microsoft is *always* shipping Microcode. At the moment,
it's delivering what I would guess to be Nov 2017 or
so microcode. Not Jan 8, 2018 microcode. Linux has
already delivered Jan 8, 2018 microcode. The microcode
file, while called "Linux" on the Intel site, is actually
suitable for *any* OS. Since Intel delivers a copy to
Microsoft directly, no web site delivery is needed. But
for the 500 distros out there, Intel provides microcode
for download, so those people can pick it up.

Then why is everyone saying we need to update our BIOSs?

I pretty sure Steve himself said in the podcast that Microsoft
hadn't updated the microcode in Windows for years.


Sorry, forgot which newsgroup I was in, I mean Steve Gibson of GRC.COM.


That's not true.

As one of my test cases, I booted a Linux LiveCD, one
a couple years old, and the microcode level was 16.

The Windows 10 16299.192 microcode level is 28.

The very latest Linux one available, is 2a.

Microsoft *is* providing OS level microcode, just
not using the January 8, 2018 version quite yet.

Neither is Linux, on all distros. Only the most
modern got it so far. Linux in the distro package
manager, provides a separate line item for
"microcode.dat", and presumably selecting that
does whatever magic is needed to make an initrd
or similar. You would look in your package manager,
to see if perhaps the microcode had been recently
updated. In the Ubuntu test VM, I could indeed see
the word "microcode" in a list of 500MB worth
of patches. It was an item in there. I saw it fly by.

And in Linux, I have a couple ways to check. Via
dmesg | grep microcode, or via looking at
cat /proc/cpuinfo or similar. Since I know some of
the available revision numbers for my CPU, I'm able
to tell whether a January patch was installed or not.

Â*...

Running Windows 7 Ultimate 64 as-is puts my Core i7-4790K to revision
1C which seems likely to be really old since the 2018-01-08 microcode
puts it to revision 23 and the 2017-11-17 microcode puts it to
revision 22.


If you use the Intel bootable floppy version, that
one will in effect return the BIOS version, so you
can determine the "lowest" revision the hardware
can return at the moment. You could see if the BIOS
put the 1C there or not. If the BIOS version is less
than 1C, then Windows put the 1C there.

Â*Â* Paul

I only have a USB floppy drive and it doesn't seem to boot properly from
that.

I'll see if I can make a bootable CD out of it somehow.

--

Brian Gregory (in England).