Stefan Mileschin

Dark side of the hyperthreading loom

While the war is blazing between Intel and AMD fanboys over the superiority of the latest range of chips, debian developers have spotted some rather nasty coding in Chipzilla’s latest creations.

During April and May, Intel started updating processor documentation with a new errata note and it turned out that the reason was that Skylake and Kaby Lake silicon has a microcode bug it did not want any one to find out about.

The errata is described in detail on the Debian mailing list, and affects 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.

According to the Debian advisory says affected users need to disable hyper-threading “immediately” in their BIOS or UEFI settings, because the processors can “dangerously misbehave when hyper-threading is enabled.”

Symptoms can include application and system misbehaviour, data corruption, data loss and voting Donald Trump (we made the last one up).

Henrique de Moraes Holschuh warned that all operating systems, not only Linux, were subject to the bug.

http://fudzilla.com/news/43964-skyla...yper-threading