AMD microcode not updating

Question

I have recently installed Gentoo Linux on my AMD Ryzen 7 1700X. Now I face segmentation faults during heavy compilation loads and also random restarts in an idle state.

As a very first step I verified the current microcode version:

grep -m 1 microcode /proc/cpuinfo
microcode       : 0x8001126

However, according to this table the latest microcode should be 0x08001129. It thus seems to be a good idea to update the microcode for the CPU.

So I emerged =sys-kernel/linux-firmware-20180730 (containing /lib/firmware/amd-ucode/microcode_amd_fam17h.bin). Further, I enabled the following options in the kernel:

CONFIG_MICROCODE=y
CONFIG_MICROCODE_AMD=y

After a reboot, I tried loading the microcode manually (late microcode update):

echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/microcode/reload

However, when I do this, no new line appears in dmesg:

dmesg | grep microcode
[    0.465121] microcode: CPU0: patch_level=0x08001126
[    0.465514] microcode: CPU1: patch_level=0x08001126
[    0.465932] microcode: CPU2: patch_level=0x08001126
[    0.466394] microcode: CPU3: patch_level=0x08001126
[    0.466772] microcode: CPU4: patch_level=0x08001126
[    0.467159] microcode: CPU5: patch_level=0x08001126
[    0.467537] microcode: CPU6: patch_level=0x08001126
[    0.467908] microcode: CPU7: patch_level=0x08001126
[    0.468268] microcode: CPU8: patch_level=0x08001126
[    0.468653] microcode: CPU9: patch_level=0x08001126
[    0.468999] microcode: CPU10: patch_level=0x08001126
[    0.469409] microcode: CPU11: patch_level=0x08001126
[    0.469744] microcode: CPU12: patch_level=0x08001126
[    0.470136] microcode: CPU13: patch_level=0x08001126
[    0.470455] microcode: CPU14: patch_level=0x08001126
[    0.470757] microcode: CPU15: patch_level=0x08001126
[    0.471092] microcode: Microcode Update Driver: v2.2.

I would expect something like microcode: CPU0: new patch_level=0x08001129. What am I missing here? Some kernel CONFIG_ option? Can I turn on some sort of debug information? Or even better – how can I list the microcode version provided in microcode_amd_fam17h.bin?

Answer 1

You could try something like this:

CONFIG_PREVENT_FIRMWARE_BUILD=y
CONFIG_FIRMWARE_MEMMAP=y
CONFIG_MICROCODE=y
# CONFIG_MICROCODE_INTEL is not set
CONFIG_MICROCODE_AMD=y
CONFIG_MICROCODE_OLD_INTERFACE=y
CONFIG_FW_LOADER=y
CONFIG_EXTRA_FIRMWARE="amd-ucode/microcode_amd_fam17h.bin"
CONFIG_EXTRA_FIRMWARE_DIR="/lib/firmware"
# CONFIG_FW_LOADER_USER_HELPER is not set

(Note, if you want to list more than one file in CONFIG_EXTRA_FIRMWARE they should be space separated, and their paths should be relative to CONFIG_EXTRA_FIRMWARE_DIR.)

But that is possibly not going to work (it works for me if using graphics and network firmware only, haven't tried with CPU firmware), so, try another way: ignore the value for CONFIG_EXTRA_FIRMWARE above(ie. don't set it; but maybe the other ones are still needed, unsure) and instead try early microcode loading by prepending the CPU microcode file to the initramfs file, maybe something like this(in Gentoo):

/etc/kernel/postinst.d/25-glue_cpu_microcode_to_kernel:

#!/bin/bash

bootdir='/bewt'
initramfsfname="initramfs"
initramfs="$( realpath -- "/${bootdir}/${initramfsfname}" )"
vmlinuz="/${bootdir}/kernel"

prepend_microcode () {
  echo "prepending CPU microcode to ${initramfs}"
  local destfirst="/tmp/initrd/"
  local destmc="${destfirst}/kernel/x86/microcode/"
#  mkdir -p "${destmc}"
    install -dm644 "${destmc}"

  #this will replace the symlink /bewt/initramfs (on gentoo) with the file!
  #but this makes genkernel fail as such: 
  #ln: failed to create symbolic link 'initramfs.old' -> '': No such file or directory
  #even though it doesn't touch the .old file!
  # so to fix this, we'll use realpath above!

  ( cp -f "/lib/firmware/amd-ucode/microcode_amd.bin" "${destmc}/AuthenticAMD.bin" && cd "${destfirst}" && find . | cpio -o -H newc > "../ucode.cpio" 2>/dev/null && cd .. && cat "ucode.cpio" "${initramfs}" > "/tmp/${initramfsfname}" && chmod a-rwx "/tmp/${initramfsfname}" && mv -f "/tmp/${initramfsfname}" "${initramfs}" )
    local ec=$?
    if [[ $ec -eq 0 ]]; then
        echo "success."
    else
        #TODO: make errors be red so it's more obvious
        echo "failed!"
    fi
    return $ec
}

prepend_microcode

However genkernel might (still? 3 years later) ignore files in /etc/kernel/postinst.d/ (or that was only happening in 2015 and got fixed since, or maybe for some other reasons), which means you'll have to manually run genkernel yourself(to compile kernel) and then, after it, manually run all in scripts present in /etc/kernel/postinst.d/, doing so looks like this:

echo "!! Running genkernel..." time genkernel all --bootdir="/bewt" --install --symlink --no-splash --no-mountboot --makeopts="-j4 V=0" --no-keymap --lvm --no-mdadm --no-dmraid --no-zfs --no-multipath --no-iscsi --disklabel --luks --no-gpg --no-netboot --no-unionfs --no-firmware --no-integrated-initramfs --compress-initramfs --compress-initrd --compress-initramfs-type=best --loglevel=5 --color --no-mrproper --no-clean --no-postclear --oldconfig ec="$?" if test "$ec" -ne "0"; then echo "!! genkernel failed $ec" exit "$ec" fi echo "!! Done genkernel" list=( `find /etc/kernel/postinst.d -type f -executable | sort --general-numeric-sort` ) echo "!! Found executables: ${list[@]}" for i in ${list[@]}; do ec="-1" while test "0" -ne "$ec"; do echo "!! Executing: '$i'" time $i ec="$?" echo "!! Exit code: $ec" if test "$ec" -ne "0"; then echo "!! something went wrong, fix it then press Enter to retry executing '$i' or press C-c now." #exit $ec time read -p -s "!! Press Enter to re-execute that or C-c to cancel" fi done done

(note: the bootdir used above is /bewt instead of /boot, so you might want to change at least that; also the string microcode_amd.bin above should be replaced with yours: microcode_amd_fam17h.bin)
That list= and for above is not the proper way to handle file names, unless they have no spaces, newlines etc. which is obviously assumed above.

If you want to take a look at an old 4.1.7 kernel .config that did cpu-firmware early loading, see this one.