Even a CPU has a little firmware inside. Since a lot of years it is possible to update it to fix little or bigger bugs. Usually this operation is done while updating your motherboard's BIOS, and the update is permanent. But thanks to the architecture of the linux kernel, we can update it at the last version every time we boot our OS. This is a really fast operation brought to you by microcode.ctl (in Ubuntu), and it permits to avoid waiting for an updated closed-source BIOS to solve bugs; it downloads the last microcode for your Intel or AMD CPU every time you update your system, and it installs it on every OS startup.
This little script is designed to give you a way to see what's happening with CPU updates. On every startup, a popup notification throught libnotify shows you the old revision of the firmware, the newer version applied while booting and the releasing date of the last update. It works on Ubuntu linux, but you can help me to port this script on other linux distribution
Features
- Ubuntu pretty notification bubble
- compatibility with either AMD and Intel cpu
- automatic conversion of the version number from hex to decimal integer
- informs you whether your processor microcode is already up-to-date or had been updated