Meltdown and Spectre Patches Bricking Ubuntu 16.04 Computers (bleepingcomputer.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 users who updated to receive the Meltdown and Spectre patches are reporting they are unable to boot their systems and have been forced to roll back to an earlier Linux kernel image. The issues were reported by a large number of users on the Ubuntu forums and Ubuntu's Launchpad bug tracker. Only Ubuntu users running the Xenial 16.04 series appear to be affected.

All users who reported issues said they were unable to boot after upgrading to Ubuntu 16.04 with kernel image 4.4.0-108. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu OS, deployed Linux kernel image 4.4.0-108 as part of a security update for Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 users, yesterday, on January 9. According to Ubuntu Security Notice USN-3522-1 and an Ubuntu Wiki page, this was the update that delivered the Meltdown and Spectre patches.

Comments

i have an AMD Ryzen-7 1700 & Radeon RX-580

[FudRucker]

and so far i have not found a Linux distro to run very well on it without the system locking up, windows 10 would even lock up on it until i did a BIOS update and wiped the OEM copy of windows 10 off and did a clean windows install from an ISO downloaded from microsoft, i think it has something to do with the graphics card because Linux will run good on it until the xorg launches and tries to run an x-window-system & desktop GUI