intel microcode fun

The majority of the servers in my closet are running intel processors (mostly P3's). Apparently intel publishes microcode updates for its processors, which should supposedly improve the processor's performance and/or reliability. I have no idea if it does improve anything at this point as Intel does not provide a changelog for the microcode. Gentoo has an ebuild for the linux microcode utility which you can setup to auto-upgrade you're processor at boot. Microcode changes do not survive power-down, so they must be re-applied at boot.

Sep 21 18:00:26 sakuya kernel: microcode: CPU1 updated from revision 0x0 to 0x7, date = 05052000 Sep 21 18:00:26 sakuya kernel: microcode: CPU0 updated from revision 0xc to 0x13, date = 02062001

As you can see, there were quite a few revisions between my released P3 800's and the published intel microcode. I'll update this in a few weeks with my findings.