Detected by the Debian community, a problem in HyperThreading on Intel Kaby Lake and Skylake processors, which can lead to corruption of the operating system and files.

The arrival of new family of processors usually brings with it some unforeseen problems that are normally detected by the community, while they use these systems. This weekend it was announced that the new Intel processors give a micro code error and it has been known thanks to the Debian.org forums. Henrique de Moraes Holschuh has discovered that computers with new Intel Skylake and Kaby Lake processors could 'in some situations, behave dangerously bad when HyperThreading is enabled'. Erratic behavior could include 'bad application and system behavior, data corruption and data loss'.

The Debian advisor has commented that there is a fairly simple solution to avoid these behavioral issues under Skylake or Kaby Lake processors, which is to simply disable HyperThreading. The affected processors are Intel Core for desktop and laptop computers and Xeon for servers. Processors in these families with HyperThreading will be affected. Intel has added this problem to the documentation of its processors and whose failure has been difficult to discover, since these processors have been on the market for a long time.

The problem under Debian, with respect to microcode, has been reported to affect a significant number of users using the said operating system. They also highlight that users of other operating systems could also be affected, even those that are not based on Linux. Debian recommends disabling HyperThreading on XNUMXth and XNUMXth generation processors for now, until motherboard manufacturers update the BIOS. An unexpected problem, which can be solved by some knowledgeable users, since in Debian they have included the micro code that solves the problem BIOS.

Source: Debian