Microcode updates for AMD too
If you don’t have an Intel CPU, but still want to perform microcode updates, cpucontrol(8) now supports more recent AMD CPUs.
One more microcode tip
I say “one more” like I know when this saga will end. If you are using the devcpu-data port to update your processors, you’ll need to add microcode_update_enable=”YES” to your /etc/rc.conf, as Sepherosa Ziehau points out.
Microcode updates on DragonFly
One side effect of Meltdown/Spectre are CPU microcode (firmware) updates. For future needs: sysutils/devcpu-data is the port that has the updates for Intel, and cpucontrol(8) is the program you run on DragonFly to add them. I haven’t used this myself, yet, so I can’t tell you how necessary an immediate update could be – but …
Lazy Reading for 2022/02/06
Mini-theme: music. Retrocomputing can be more than games. The PinePhone keyboard case. PDA nostalgia. Simulating the IBM 360/50 mainframe from its microcode. Linked cause The Mythical Man-Month talks about the 360 and I never had a picture in my head to connect. The Whimsical Web. (via) (Non-)Human, AI Reproducing Absence. Sendxmpp as a Replacement for …
Lazy Reading for 2019/12/08
Accidental theme this week: terminals. Teletext’s creative legacy. (via) Related: Teletext, the font. (via) The Plain Text Project. (Thanks, Benn Collver.) TROS: How IBM mainframes stored microcode in transformers. IBM, sonic delay lines, and the history of the 80×24 display. An answer to the recently-linked-here “80×25” post, and perhaps the definitive answer on terminal size. …
In Other BSDs for 2019/01/26
There’s some convention stuff scattered in here; we’re heading towards the active season… Anyone running pfSense on non-netgate hardware in a prod environment? vmm(4) for i386 deleted from -current. OpenBSD on the Acer Aspire One, At Ten. (via) 05/25/2019 : V BSDDAY in Brazil. The first report on LLD porting. Update Intel Microcode on FreeBSD. (via) …
In Other BSDs for 2018/01/20
Done well ahead of time. ELI5: In 2018, what are the pros and cons between Linux, FreeBSD, and macOS in terms of kernel technology and user space tools. Adding IPv6 to an Nginx website on FreeBSD / FreshPorts. Should I use BSD? Certifications…are they worth it? Will they be in the future? OPNsense 18.1-RC2 released. …
In Other BSDs for 2018/01/13
A full slate of BSDs this week. Church of BSD. From 2005, and it is accurate for that timeframe. (via) ADOM, newly updated at 3.0.6, but only at 1.1.1_6 in ports/dports, pkgsrc, and two years gone in OpenBSD. But the ADOM download page lists new BSD versions? I may not have investigated far enough. OPNsense® …
More Meltdown fixes
If you’re on the bleeding edge of DragonFly and already updated for Meltdown fixes, there’s a few more commits you’ll want to get. Matthew Dillon wrote a summary of the current status, noting there’s not much you can do for Spectre beyond new hardware. There is an update to the “defensive browser setup” plan for …
A pile of DragonFly commits
In an effort to reduce my backlog of DragonFly things to post about, here’s quick notes: The path to xauth is now configurable, though correct by default. (that’s bit me in the past) There’s a new callout*() implementation. cpuctl(4) has been imported to allow CPU microcode updates. libm has been updated with math functions from FreeBSD …