Patent ID: 11941391
Assignee: INTEL CORPORATION
Field: Computer technology (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC G | IPC G

Claim 8:
9. A bare metal platform, comprising:
one or more host central processing units (CPUs);
a memory, coupled to the one or more CPUs;
a firmware storage device in which firmware including microcode (uCode) are stored, communicatively coupled to at least one of the one or more CPUs, wherein the firmware storage device has a layout partitioned into a plurality of regions, including one or more uCode firmware volume (FV) regions; and
an out-of-band controller, communicatively coupled to at least one host CPU and communicatively coupled to the firmware storage device,
wherein the bare metal platform is configured to be implemented in a cloud service provider environment and host a tenant environment in which a host operating system and applications are executed on the one or more CPUs, and wherein the bare metal platform is configured to,
implement a uCode hot-upgrade process using the out-of-band controller to update uCode for at least one of the one or more CPUs during runtime operation of the host operating system using a uCode patch;
write, using the out-of-band controller, the uCode patch to a uCode FV region; and
for at least one of the one or more CPUs, update the uCode for that CPU with uCode from the uCode FV region.