I recently moved a system to a different CPU.

I got lots of needrestart warnings about a pending processor microcode
upgrade but not even a reboot fixed the issue.

The reason is that the initramfs had not been updated yet so restarting
did nothing because the initramfs did not contain any uCode updates for
the new CPU, only the old one.

needrestart should not request a restart in this situation because it
will cause the new uCode to be loaded at boot and thus needrestart will
continue to request a reboot even though that doesn't do anything.

In addition to scanning installed microcode from the intel-microcode
package, I would suggest scanning each of the initramfs files with
iucode_tool (see the command-line below).

If the initramfs uCode is not present or is outdated compared to the
installed uCode, an initramfs rebuild could be suggested.

If no initramfs files are present, the reboot comparison could be done
between the installed and running uCode.

If initramfs files are present, the reboot comparison should be done
between the latest initramfs uCode revision and the running uCode.

Pending processor microcode upgrade!

Diagnostics:
  The currently running processor microcode revision is ... which is not the expected microcode revision ....

Restarting the system to load the new processor microcode will not be handled automatically, so you should consider rebooting. [Return]

$ /usr/sbin/iucode_tool -tr -Sl /boot/initrd.img-4.15.0-3-amd64
/usr/sbin/iucode_tool: system has processor(s) with signature ...
microcode bundle 1: /boot/initrd.img-4.15.0-3-amd64
selected microcodes:

Hello,

the µCode-Check fails if there is no iucode-tool installed at all, which I would not expect. Without the tool, there can be no updates beside what the machine's BIOS provides and checking for that is out of scope for needrestart. I'd suggest to skip firmware processing completely if there's no iucode-tool installed.

:wq! PoC

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