Skylake, Kaby Lake chips have a crash bug with hyperthreading enabled

[Sarkar]

Under certain conditions, systems with Skylake and Kaby Lake Intel Core processors (in desktop, high-end desktop, embedded and mobile platforms), Xeon v5 and v6 server processors, and some Pentium models can crash due to a bug that occurs when hyperthreading is enabled. Intel has fixed the bug in a microcode update, but until and unless you install the update, the recommendation is that hyperthreading be disabled in the system firmware.

A fix is available for Linux systems; Windows users will have to use firmware updates.

Windows users, should also be on the look out for a microcode driver update – and consider disabling hyper-threading until it's available

Intel's Skylake and Kaby Lake CPUs have nasty hyper-threading bug

 

[sumitroy]

Linux users can see if their computers have been acting flaky because of this problem by running the following shell commands.

First, to see if you have a potentially vulnerable CPU run:

$ grep name /proc/cpuinfo | sort -u

Once you know your processor model name, check the following sites to see if it's listed: Skylake and Kaby Lake. If it is, then run the following shell program:

If you get the result,"Hyper-threading is supported" you have a problem; otherwise, you're fine.

If you do get the bad-news message on a Kaby Lake processor, you should disable hyper-threading in your PC's BIOS/UEFI configuration. There is a fix for this, but it's not been released

Debian Linux reveals Intel Skylake and Kaby Lake processors have broken hyper-threading | ZDNet