testing early microcode loading

[Pete Wright]

On 9/10/18 5:41 PM, Mark Johnston wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 10, 2018 at 12:48:56PM -0700, Pete Wright wrote:
>>
>> On 9/10/18 11:26 AM, Mark Johnston wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Support for boot-time loading of Intel microcode updates has landed in
>>> the kernel in r337715, and in the sysutils/devcpu-data port as of 1.20.
>>> I'd like to solicit some testing of the feature ahead of 12.0.
>> Hey there Mark,
>> So I've just tested this on a kabylake system running a kernel/world 
>> from Sept 7th which I believe is recent enough.
>>
>> After updating /boot/loader.conf as per your email I am not sure if any 
>> microcode updates are being applied.  I'm not seeing any messages 
>> regarding firmware updates being applied in the dmesg buffer.  
> Right, we currently print something only if an update was configured
> but failed to apply.  We should probably print something either way,
> perhaps only if the kernel is booted with -v.
i could certainly as being helpful for debugging.
>> running x86info results in the following:
>>
>> $ sudo kldload -n cpuctl && sudo x86info -a | grep Micro
>> Microcode version: 0x000000000000008e
>>
>> this is after rebooting with the updated loader.conf as well as running 
>> the rc script by hand.  i didn't think to compare the output of x86info 
>> before running the rc script, i can do that later today.
> Thanks.  If the boot-time update succeeded, the rc script should have
> been a no-op.  Can you check for "updating cpu /dev/cpuctl..." messages
> in /var/log/messages?  That would indicate that the rc script applied an
> update, which would imply that the boot-time update failed somehow.


when i ran the rc script after boot i saw the CPU related messages in
dmesg on the console (CPU count, type, features, etc).  i did not see
anything in /var/log/messages of interest either.  i'll re-test tomorrow
when i get back into the office and let you know if i see anything of
interest.  my plan is to:

- boot with the /boot/loader.conf additions for applying microcode and
save the output from x86info

- boot with loader.conf settings uncommented, view output of x86conf

- then run rc script and get output of x86conf

-pete

-- 
Pete Wright
pete at nomadlogic.org
310.309.9298