Intel confirms reboot issue with Spectre fix

Intel has confirmed reports that the patches it has released to address the Spectre and Meltdown kernel memory vulnerabilities are causing unexpected system reboots in some configurations and an adverse impact on performance.

In a blog post, Intel General Manager for Data Centres Navin Shenoy said it has received reports from customers of more frequent reboots as a result of installing these patches.

The company first acknowledged these reports two weeks ago and had reportedly advised some customers not to apply the fixes as a result of the risk of reboots.

Intel has been able to reproduce the issues internally and determined that they impact Broadwell, Haswell, Ivy Bridge, Sandy Bridge, Skylake and Kaby Lake processors in some configurations.

Intel is working towards a root cause and plans to start making beta microcode updates available to OEMs, cloud service providers, system manufacturers and software vendors for internal evaluation this week.

Shenoy said that Intel has now issued firmware updates for 90% of Intel CPUs introduced in the past five years.

In response to reports that the fixes are also causing a negative performance impact, Shenoy said internal tests have shown a performance impact that ranges depending on specific workloads and configurations.

“Generally speaking, the workloads that incorporate a larger number of user/kernel privilege changes and spend a significant amount of time in privileged mode will be more adversely impacted,” he said.

Testing has shown a performance impact of between 0 and 2% using standard benchmarking measures, but an online transaction processing benchmark simulating modelling a brokerage firm’s customer-broker-stock exchange interaction showed a 4% impact.

Testing has also shown an adverse impact on benchmarks for storage depending on configuration modes.

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