Patches against vulnerabilities Meltdown & Specter cause problems with downloading Ubuntu 16.04

Original author: Catalin Cimpanu
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Users of Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 who recently installed updates against the vulnerabilities Meltdown and Specter report that they were unable to boot their systems after that and are forced to roll back to earlier Linux kernel images.

Messages about this are featured in many forums, including Ubuntu , Ubuntu's Launchpad bug tracker, and Reddit . In this case, probably, problems are observed only for users of Ubuntu Xenial 16.04.

All users who have problems report that it has become impossible to boot after upgrading to the kernel 4.4.0-108.

“I upgraded to 4.4.0-108-generic this morning and there was a problem loading,” said Punit Patpatia earlier today.

“Exactly - the same problem, after the update hangs on the boot screen,” added another user on the Ubuntu forum.

Canonical, the Ubuntu OS company, provided the Linux kernel 4.4.0-108 as part of the Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 security update earlier on January 9th.

According to the Ubuntu Security Notice USN-3522-1 and the Ubuntu Wiki , this update aims to address the Meltdown and Specter vulnerabilities.

A Canonical representative was unable to comment on these issues, however, two new updates to Ubuntu 16.04 [ 1 , 2 ] containing the Linux kernel 4.4.0-109 were released two hours before the publication of the original article.

Some users who reported the problem earlier write that the new kernel works without problems. In extreme cases, rollback to kernel version 4.4.0-104 also solves the problems with loading.

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