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Intel Says Newer Chips Also Hit by Unwanted Reboots After Patch (zdnet.com)
Intel says the unexpected reboots triggered by patching older chips affected by Meltdown and Spectre are happening to its newer chips, too. From a report: Intel confirmed in an update late Wednesday that not only are its older Broadwell and Haswell chips tripping up on the firmware patches, but newer CPUs through to the latest Kaby Lake chips are too. The firmware updates do protect Intel chips against potential Spectre attacks, but machines with Ivy Bridge, Sandy Bridge, Skylake, and Kaby Lake architecture processors are rebooting more frequently once the firmware has been updated, Intel said. Intel has also updated its original Meltdown-Spectre advisory with a new warning about the stability issues and recommends OEMs and cloud providers test its beta silicon microcode updates before final release. These beta releases, which mitigate the Spectre Variant 2 CVE-2017-5715 attack on CPU speculative execution, will be available next week.
These "unwanted reboots" are system crashes.
... do not apply any of the "patches" or new firmware! A little perspective can go a long way here and unless you have a hosted data center where you MUST be current for legal liability reasons, anyone applying these fixes deserve what they get. The chances of this vulnerability (as opposed to the 94 quadrillion viruses, etc already out there) affecting you are so small as to be ridiculous for you to do anything to mitigate. Much less tampering with the entire, delicately balanced ecosystem of mobos, OSes, etc.