Why is "microcode" not installed?

[donhwyo]

I was looking at speeding up boot times and came across somewhere a suggestion to make sure "microcode" was installed. Checking my Untangle showed it is not installed. Don't know if it will boot faster or not, probably not. But I wonder why it is not installed? From the debian wiki.

Processors from Intel and AMD may need updates to their microcode to operate correctly. These updates fix bugs/errata that can cause anything from incorrect processing, to code and data corruption, and system lockups.

It is very difficult to know for sure whether you need a microcode update or not, but it is not safe at all to just ignore them. You might not notice their effect and have precious data silently corrupted, or an important program silently misbehave. Or you could experience one of those unexplainable and infrequent software issues (such as kernel oops, application segfaults) or hardware issues (including sudden reboots and hangs).

https://wiki.debian.org/Microcode

Build: 16.2.2.20210223T082805.9e9db41866-1buster
Kernel: 4.19.0-11-untangle-amd64

[sky-knight]

See those "non-free" flags?

That basically means no Debian distro CAN use them, because it's a violation of licensing. End users can use them, but distributing them is another matter.

Not to mention in this case it's horrifically processor specific.

[donhwyo]

Well I see the "microcode" installed on proxmox so I hope they are not violating the rules. I didn't install it as I don't think I ever paid attention to it.

root@pve:~# dpkg -l |grep microcode
ii  amd64-microcode                      3.20181128.1                       amd64        Processor microcode firmware for AMD CPUs

Anyway just thought it may play a part in some of the mysterious crash or reboot threads that pop up occasionally.

Thanks

[sky-knight]

You know... you're right that might explain some of the IPSec / L2TP crashes actually...

[balrog]

Thank you for this. installed and rebooted on mine, works fine. Untangle boots faster from my unscientific test. Should have rebooted without the microcode for base speed test.

Results:
root@untangle:/etc/apt# uname -a
Linux untangle.home.local 4.19.0-11-untangle-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.19.146-1+untangle1buster (2020-09-29) x86_64 GNU/Linux
root@untangle:/etc/apt# dpkg -l | grep microcode
ii intel-microcode 3.20210216.1~deb10u1 amd64 Processor microcode firmware for Intel CPUs
ii iucode-tool 2.3.1-1 amd64 Intel processor microcode tool