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A critical bug in the Intel Skylake and Kaby Lake causes a reboot and system hang

In processors Intel Skylake Kaby Lake and find errors, leading to unpredictable system behavior under certain conditions. Techpowerup reports about it with reference to the official Debian community.

A threat to the stability of the system and security of data are processors which support multithread execution technology Hyper-Threading. The failure is manifested in all the chips on the Skylake microarchitecture and Kaby Lake: mobile, desktop and server.

A certain sequence of commands may cause the computer to reboot or the system hang. The problem concerns not only the operating systems based on Linux, but any others, including macOS, the authors note.

Intel itself describes the error in the document as follows: “Under certain conditions, short cycles of less than 64 commands using the registers AH, BH, CH or DH and the corresponding extended registers (e.g., RAX, EAX, AX, or AH) may cause unpredictable system behavior. This occurs only when both active logical processor per physical processor”.

Some motherboard manufacturers have already begun to implement the appropriate fixes in the new BIOS versions, but Intel information about this vulnerability was published only in April and may, so the user can always count on the quickness of partners. As a temporary solution you can prevent Hyper-Threading in the UEFI setup.

In the case of Skylake processors for desktop systems affected all existing stepping. By the way, mobile and server processors of this generation also suffer from this defect. Intel recognizes that the problem can be solved via firmware update.

Processors Kaby Lake of a similar defect is also not deprived, but if we are talking about the latest models of the family Kaby Lake-X B0 stepping, they are “off the hook”.

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