US 11,941,391 B2
Microcode(uCode) hot-upgrade method for bare metal cloud deployment
Mohan J. Kumar, Aloha, OR (US); Sarathy Jayakumar, Portland, OR (US); Chuan Song, Shanghai (CN); Ruixia Li, Shanghai (CN); Xiaojin Yuan, Shanghai (CN); Haiyue Wang, Shanghai (CN); and Chong Han, Shanghai (CN)
Assigned to Intel Corporation, Santa Clara, CA (US)
Filed by Intel Corporation, Santa Clara, CA (US)
Filed on Apr. 6, 2020, as Appl. No. 16/841,410.
Prior Publication US 2020/0285461 A1, Sep. 10, 2020
Int. Cl. G06F 8/656 (2018.01); G06F 8/654 (2018.01); G06F 9/4401 (2018.01); G06F 9/445 (2018.01); G06F 9/455 (2018.01)
CPC G06F 8/656 (2018.02) [G06F 8/654 (2018.02); G06F 9/4401 (2013.01); G06F 9/44557 (2013.01); G06F 9/45541 (2013.01)] 17 Claims
OG exemplary drawing
 
1. A method, comprising:
during runtime operation of a host operating system in a tenant environment hosted on a bare metal platform including one or more host central processing units (CPUs) on which the host operating system and applications in the tenant environment are executed, at least one of the one or more host CPUs coupled to a firmware storage device in which firmware including microcode (uCode) is stored and wherein the firmware storage device has a layout partitioned into a plurality of regions, including one or more uCode firmware volume (FV) regions,
providing a uCode patch to an out-of-band controller communicatively coupled to the firmware storage device;
writing, using the out-of-band controller, the uCode patch to a uCode FV region; and
employing an out-of-band uCode hot-upgrade process to update firmware uCode for at least one of the one or more host CPUs by updating the uCode for that CPU with uCode from the uCode FV region.