For example, the VMkernel may have read and cached some information from the CPU that will be changed by the microcode update.ĮSXi therefore carries its microcode updates in boot modules. This design choice was made because, in general, some microcode updates are not safe to apply later in boot. The 6.0 microcode updater can run only at this early stage. Starting in ESXi 6.0, microcode updates are applied very early in boot, long before the ESXi filesystem is available. Note: This procedure is not supported by VMware, and in production environments VMware recommends using only microcode obtained from your platform vendor. This article explains how you can use ESXi’s CPU microcode loader with microcode VMware did not bundle into your ESXi release.
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What if that’s not enough?īut what if you really need an update that neither your platform vendor nor VMware has released yet? Perhaps the update corrects a CPU erratum that’s causing you a serious problem, but it wasn’t critical enough or wasn’t fixed soon enough for VMware to have bundled it into the ESXi release you’re running. We do this because our hardware partners have asked us to avoid shipping microcode that they themselves have not yet tested on their platforms and are not yet ready to support. Instead, only a very few critical updates are bundled in, and new updates are added in only after consultation with major hardware vendors. If such an update is found, ESXi loads it into the CPU, where it remains until the machine is powered off or rebooted.īy VMware policy, however, ESXi does not bundle in all the latest microcode for supported CPUs. During each boot, ESXi checks whether any of its bundled microcode updates is applicable to the CPUs in your machine and is newer than the microcode the CPUs are currently running. ESXi ships with a very small number of microcode updates bundled in that are important for ESXi to run correctly on certain CPU models. How does ESXi help?ĮSXi includes a boot-time microcode loader that can help when the platform vendor hasn’t made an update available yet.
Usually this is not a big problem, but occasionally you might need a microcode update that you can’t get from your platform vendor yet. Unfortunately, some platform vendors are slow about pulling the latest microcode into their BIOS updates, slow about releasing BIOS updates, or don’t release BIOS updates at all. If all is well, the platform vendors then make the updated microcode available to end users by rolling it into a CPU firmware (BIOS) update. The platform vendors test the microcode with their platforms. The processor vendor develops, tests, and digitally signs the microcode update, then makes it available to the platform vendors. Normally, CPU microcode updates are the responsibility of the CPU vendor (in the x86 world typically Intel or AMD) and the hardware platform vendor (such as Apple, Dell, HP, etc.). What are microcode updates?Īll modern CPUs include a writable microcode store that allows the CPU vendor to fix or work around certain CPU errata in the field by providing customers with updated microcode. For earlier versions of ESXi, the following third-party blog post seems generally accurate, though of course not officially endorsed by VMware: FAQ: CPU microcode updates and VMware ESXi.
This article applies beginning with ESXi 6.0. Using the ESXi 6.0 CPU Microcode Loading FeatureĪbstract: Occasionally ESXi users want to run updated CPU microcode that isn’t yet available either from their hardware platform vendor in a BIOS update or bundled into ESXi.
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