microcode processor update: what processors are supported and what version is inside update?

Peter_V_ — Mon, 06 Jul 2015 15:30:38 GMT

Hi! I've asked this question at community forums https://communities.intel.com/message/312574 and I was suggested to ask here.

Intel provides Processor microcode update. Is it possible to find out what CPUs are supported and what microcode version is inside update? For example, what CPUs this update: Intel® Download Center supports and what microcode version is expected to appear after upgrade?

The reason I'm asking is the following: we have a trouble with some HP and Supermicro servers: after some time kernel errors out with MCE error (Machine Check Exception: 4 Bank 5: be00000000800400). It is possible to find many bug reports, e.g. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=715485, and suggested fix was to upgrade bios. Bios upgrade was expected to fix many processor issues (Drivers & Software - HP Support Center) and it updated microcode version from 0x14 to 0x1a.Yet we still experience this problem on some servers after bios upgrade. It looks like qemu running on this servers is somehow related to this problem - at least we have this problem on servers with qemu running and we do not have this problem on systems without qemu, so we suppose that probable not all possible microcode updates were applied. At least bios update was issued on 14 Aug 2013 while latest microcode update from intel was published in 2015. So I've tried to upgrade microcode and although it succeed (accroding to microcode_ctl) but update did nothing (microcode version according to /proc/cpuing had not changed)! But what makes me wonder: it failed both on servers with and without BIOS update. Even if there was not updates from intel I expect that on systems without bios upgrade this update will update microcode version from 0x14 to 0x1a but this have not happened. Could you clarify why?

I'm talking about HP gen 7 servers with Intel(R) Xeon(R) X5675 @ 3.07GHz Processor.

processor	23
vendor_id	GenuineIntel
cpu family	6
model	44
model name	Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5675 @ 3.07GHz
stepping	2
microcode	0x1a
cpu MHz	3067.089

Thank you for you time,

Peter.

topic microcode processor update: what processors are supported and what version is inside update? in Software Tuning, Performance Optimization & Platform Monitoring

microcode processor update: what processors are supported and what version is inside update?