Lenovo Thinkpad x220 - Proprietary Driver for Microcode for Intel processor?
 

Hey LQ,

I finally did it! I solo boot linux on a machine of mine! Now I'm anxious to get this thing all spiffy.

I'm using Xubuntu Xenial, and in my proprietary drivers window it tells me there is some microcode driver I could use. Do I need this? And what does it even do? The laptop seems to be running extremely well without it.

Thanks!

The microcode for CPU is loaded by motherboard firmware, so if you do a BIOS upgrade you will get the latest microcode, too. Loading new microcode into a running system is not always safe. There was a case with buggy instruction in CPU that was disabled by microcode update. Loading this update after the OS was loaded caused crash, because the system was initialized with this instruction enabled and considered available. If you really want to load the latest microcode you have to load it from initrd. In general - do not worry about microcode.

As Emerson said, don't worry about that. My friend has the same exact laptop with Debian Stable. All the Fn keys and everything just worked after install. Great little laptop. The x230 is really cool too, it has a backlit keyboard.