After failing to receive any kind of answer from various sources, including the developers themselves, I though that I would bring up the issue here.
Does the microcode_ctl utility work on the x86_64 processor, and in particular the Core 2 quad? If so, then how can it be successfully implemented? To those who may not know, microcode_ctl is described at this link: http://www.urbanmyth.org/microcode My kernel is compiled to include microcode support and the proper device (i.e. /dev/cpu/microcode) is in place. But every time I load the microcode module, using the command "modprobe microcode," the module takes about three minutes to be loaded which seems quite abnormal. Then, executing "microcode_ctl -f microcode.dat" will report that the new firmware has been loaded when actually it is not loaded. Executing the same command a second time, which should report that the new firmware is already loaded, only again reports that new firmware has been loaded. This behavior indicates that something is very wrong. Microcode_ctl is available for Gentoo AMD64 and there are no indications anywhere that it does _not_ work on a 64-bit system. What needs to be done to get it to load the new firmware and why does the module take three minutes to load? Microcode_ctl is far from being a popular or even essential utility but someone must have some knowledge of its function. I recall that it used to work nicely on a 32-bit machine but since I switched to pure 64-bit I can no longer use it. Frank Peters
