Questions[microcode](ubuntu)

Ubuntu 20.04 on ASUS UX303UB:

$ inxi -M -y 80
Machine:   Device: laptop System: ASUSTeK product: UX303UB v: 1.0 serial: N/A
           Mobo: ASUSTeK model: UX303UB v: 1.0 serial: N/A
           UEFI: American Megatrends v: UX303UB.206 date: 03/02/2016

I updated Ubuntu today via the built-in Software Updater program. The update installed the 5.4.0-53 kernel and completed without interruptions. Prior to this update, I had no problems booting Ubuntu.

$ dmesg | grep "microcode"
[ 0.000000] microcode: microcode updated early to revision 0xe2, date = 2020-07-14 
[ 0.558654] microcode: sig=0x406e3, pf=0x80, revision=0xe2 
[ 0.558683] microcode: Microcode Update Driver: v2.2. –

After the update, I was prompted to restart my computer, which I did. However, each time I rebooted I met a non-responsive black screen. I restarted again and could access GRUB. I could access recovery mode but I couldn't boot into normal Ubuntu. I tried rebooting many times and managed to get it working once. I installed and ran boot-repair with default settings. When I restarted it went back to the same black screen. I also tried booting the previous 5.4.0-52 kernel but it froze at "Loading initial ramdisk ...". After that I could not boot into Ubuntu at all.

What eventually worked was accessing the UEFI firmware menu and disabling Secure Boot and enabling CSM. My question is, what went wrong and how can I figure that out?

My output:

$ grep "upgrade " /var/log/dpkg.log
2020-11-11 10:25:47 upgrade network-manager-gnome:amd64 1.8.24-1ubuntu2 1.8.24-1ubuntu3
2020-11-11 10:25:47 upgrade libnma0:amd64 1.8.24-1ubuntu2 1.8.24-1ubuntu3
2020-11-11 10:25:47 upgrade gir1.2-nma-1.0:amd64 1.8.24-1ubuntu2 1.8.24-1ubuntu3
2020-11-11 10:25:55 upgrade intel-microcode:amd64 3.20200609.0ubuntu0.20.04.2 3.20201110.0ubuntu0.20.04.1
2020-11-11 10:25:55 upgrade linux-generic-hwe-20.04:amd64 5.4.0.52.55 5.4.0.53.56
2020-11-11 10:25:56 upgrade linux-image-generic-hwe-20.04:amd64 5.4.0.52.55 5.4.0.53.56
2020-11-11 10:26:06 upgrade linux-headers-generic-hwe-20.04:amd64 5.4.0.52.55 5.4.0.53.56
2020-11-11 10:26:06 upgrade linux-headers-generic:amd64 5.4.0.52.55 5.4.0.53.56
2020-11-11 10:26:07 upgrade linux-libc-dev:amd64 5.4.0-52.57 5.4.0-53.59
2020-11-11 11:02:35 upgrade libplymouth5:amd64 0.9.4git20200323-0ubuntu6.1 0.9.4git20200323-0ubuntu6.2
2020-11-11 11:02:35 upgrade plymouth-theme-ubuntu-text:amd64 0.9.4git20200323-0ubuntu6.1 0.9.4git20200323-0ubuntu6.2
2020-11-11 11:02:35 upgrade plymouth-theme-spinner:amd64 0.9.4git20200323-0ubuntu6.1 0.9.4git20200323-0ubuntu6.2
2020-11-11 11:02:35 upgrade plymouth-label:amd64 0.9.4git20200323-0ubuntu6.1 0.9.4git20200323-0ubuntu6.2
2020-11-11 11:02:36 upgrade plymouth:amd64 0.9.4git20200323-0ubuntu6.1 0.9.4git20200323-0ubuntu6.2
2020-11-11 12:35:35 upgrade libraptor2-0:amd64 2.0.15-0ubuntu1 2.0.15-0ubuntu1.20.04.1

• Upgrades at 10:25 - the upgrades that caused the boot issue
• Upgrades at 11:02 - upgrades performed via recovery mode (fix packages)
• Upgrades at 12:35 - upgrade after successfully booting into Ubuntu by disabling SecureBoot and enabling CSM

The error message says to check:

See https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/hw-vuln/mds.html for more details.

But I'm not 100% sure how to fix it.

I looked in /etc/default/intel-microcode and found this:

# Configuration script for intel-microcode version 3

#
# initramfs helper
#

# Set this to "no" to disable automatic microcode updates on boot;
# Set this to "auto" to use early initramfs mode automatically (default);
# Set this to "early" to always attempt to create an early initramfs;
# IUCODE_TOOL_INITRAMFS=auto

# Set this to "yes" (default) to use "iucode_tool --scan-system" to reduce
# the initramfs size bloat, by detecting which Intel processors are active
# in this system, and installing only their microcodes.
#
# Set this to "no" to either include all microcodes, or only the microcodes
# selected through the use of IUCODE_TOOL_EXTRA_OPTIONS below.
#
# WARNING: including all microcodes will increase initramfs size greatly.
# This can cause boot issues if the initramfs is already large.
# IUCODE_TOOL_SCANCPUS=yes

# Extra options to pass to iucode_tool, useful to forbid or to
# force the inclusion of microcode for specific processor signatures.
# See iucode_tool(8) for details.
#IUCODE_TOOL_EXTRA_OPTIONS=""

which I changed to this:

# Configuration script for intel-microcode version 3

#
# initramfs helper
#

# Set this to "no" to disable automatic microcode updates on boot;
# Set this to "auto" to use early initramfs mode automatically (default);
# Set this to "early" to always attempt to create an early initramfs;
IUCODE_TOOL_INITRAMFS=auto

# Set this to "yes" (default) to use "iucode_tool --scan-system" to reduce
# the initramfs size bloat, by detecting which Intel processors are active
# in this system, and installing only their microcodes.
#
# Set this to "no" to either include all microcodes, or only the microcodes
# selected through the use of IUCODE_TOOL_EXTRA_OPTIONS below.
#
# WARNING: including all microcodes will increase initramfs size greatly.
# This can cause boot issues if the initramfs is already large.
IUCODE_TOOL_SCANCPUS=yes

# Extra options to pass to iucode_tool, useful to forbid or to
# force the inclusion of microcode for specific processor signatures.
# See iucode_tool(8) for details.
#IUCODE_TOOL_EXTRA_OPTIONS=""

Previously, I turned off hyper threading in the BIOS and I also changed the settings in /etc/default/grub to this:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash maxcpus=6"

As, I have six physical CPUs on my machine.

Sorry for my bad English: I'm totally new at Ubuntu, and i'm trying to install it in dual boot with W10 in my laptop (hp omen 15, i7 7700hq, 12gbram, gtx1050, hdd 1tb, ssd crucial 275gb m.2, the usb I'm using is a 32gb kingston 3.0).

I've tried 11 times (literally) installing ubuntu, and it always crashes when I hit the reboot now button, it freezes for about 3 minutes in the reboot now screen, and after that gives an error in a black screen. It never has boot on Ubuntu after that. Got to say that almost all time I've tried with the laptop disconnected from any powersource and with the external peripherals also disconnected, as I've read that sometimes it gets stuck if you have two monitors and similar things.

On early tries it used to give microcode errors (0x52 if I remember well), but now (it's supposed that I've updated the microcodes) it gives other ones. (I'll put photos later). Almost always it finished with two messages Syncronizing SCSI cache, this one for the sda and sdb devices.

When I try to install it on the SSD I'm using a partition of 50gb ext4 on / and another swap of 5gbs, and when I try that on the HDD I've used two partitions apart from the swap of 5gbs, one called root and other one called home, the first one on / and the second on /home, each one of 50gbs.

What I've tried:

• Update microcode and BIOS (F50 now, before was at F34).
• Install it via different USB devices, and in ISO and DD modes (those which Rufus gives, and yes, always in GPT, my bios is in uefi mode).
• Install it on the SSD and on the HDD, as sometimes the error after pressing the reboot button was [sdc]No caching mode was found. SDA is the SSD, SDB the HDD and SDC the USB, but idk, I wanted to try.
• Install 18.04LTS and 18.10, but neither worked.
• Install it directly when it boots on my usb via install now and also via try ubuntu.
• Install it having the secure boot activated, now it's deactivated.
• I've also tried taking of the usb after pressing reboot, as sometimes it said that no cache page was found at sdc, it repeated the error despite not being inserted on the usb port.

I don't know which is the problem and how to solve it... Thanks in advance.

FINALLY, I managed to install Lubuntu 18.10 (I gave up with Ubuntu) but I don't manage my laptop to detect the external monitor (via HDMI), I´ve googled and anything, since directly it doesn't detect it (now I´m writing on it on W10 so it works properly and I´ve tried rebooting Lubuntu with no success). Does anyone have any idea of what could I do? Thanks in advande.

(I don´t know if I should make this question on another different post, if yes, let me know :) ).

Does anybody know why the amd64-microcode package gets installed automatically on systems that use Intel processors during the latest 16.04 updates on May 22, 2018?

I want to upgrade my system to mitigate Spectre and Meltdown exploits.

The relevant Ubuntu page states that I need to update microcodes: "From a guest and non-hypervisor bare-metal perspective, as of the Feb 21 kernel updates, as far as we are aware, the mitigations for Spectre and Meltdown on 64-bit amd64, ppc64el and s390x are feature-complete as long as all microcode, firmware and hypervisor updates underneath the system are done. ..."

I have intel-microcode and iucode-tool installed and updated, however running dmesg | grep -i microcode and grep -i microcode /var/log/syslog* return nothing which makes me think that either the cpu microcode doesn't get updated or something else is wrong.

Packages are up to date and there have been restarts since the last update.

operating system: Lubuntu 16.04

CPU: Intel N3700 (Braswell)

enabled software repos: main, universe

enabled updates: xenial-security

Edit:
The output of grep name /proc/cpuinfo | sort -u is
model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) CPU N3700 @ 1.60GHz

My processor is not Skylake, nor Kaby lake.

In /proc/cpuinfo hyper-threading shows up as supported, but this Intel page says it is not supported:
https://ark.intel.com/products/87261/Intel-Pentium-Processor-N3700-2M-Cache-up-to-2_40-GHz

Edit 2:
I ran sudo update-initramfs -u and rebooted. The outputs are still the same.

Output of /usr/sbin/iucode_tool -tb -lS /lib/firmware/intel-ucode/*:

/usr/sbin/iucode_tool: system has processor(s) with signature 0x000406c3
selected microcodes:

It seems that there is no updated microcode for my cpu, which is interesting since there was a selectable microcode in the Additional Drivers tab previously (late 2017); now, there isn't.

Edit 3:
Output of apt list --installed | grep intel-microcode:

WARNING: apt does not have a stable CLI interface. Use with caution in scripts.

intel-microcode/xenial-security,now 3.20180108.0+really20170707ubuntu16.04.1 amd64 [installed]

Edit 4:
Now I understand that there is no update for the cpu microcode, which means that the original problem is solved, and I will leave it as it is.

However, dmesg and journalctl -b should still output lines about microcode version, I believe.
I also noticed that these boot logs start at "5" instead of the tipical 1 or 0, and that there is a repeating error message which makes them truncated (dmesg says nothing about truncation, but journalctl says there are 371635 missed kernel messages, see below). I will ignore this for now.

March 19 06:36:40 NN systemd-journald[266]: Runtime journal (/run/log/journal/) is 8.0M, max 78.9M, 70.9M free.
March 19 06:36:40 NN systemd-journald[266]: Missed 371635 kernel messages
March 19 06:36:40 NN kernel: handle_bad_irq+0x0/0x230
March 19 06:36:40 NN kernel: ->irq_data.chip(): ffffffffbb172c40, 
March 19 06:36:40 NN kernel: chv_gpio_irqchip+0x0/0x120
March 19 06:36:40 NN kernel: ->action():           (null)
March 19 06:36:40 NN kernel:    IRQ_NOPROBE set
March 19 06:36:40 NN kernel: irq 115, desc: ffff9b91f5df8200, depth: 1, count: 0, unhandled: 0
March 19 06:36:40 NN kernel: ->handle_irq():  ffffffffb9ee8f70, 
March 19 06:36:40 NN kernel: handle_bad_irq+0x0/0x230
March 19 06:36:40 NN kernel: ->irq_data.chip(): ffffffffbb172c40, 
March 19 06:36:40 NN kernel: chv_gpio_irqchip+0x0/0x120
March 19 06:36:40 NN kernel: ->action():           (null)
March 19 06:36:40 NN kernel:    IRQ_NOPROBE set
March 19 06:36:40 NN kernel: irq 115, desc: ffff9b91f5df8200, depth: 1, count: 0, unhandled: 0
March 19 06:36:40 NN kernel: ->handle_irq():  ffffffffb9ee8f70, 
March 19 06:36:40 NN kernel: handle_bad_irq+0x0/0x230
March 19 06:36:40 NN kernel: ->irq_data.chip(): ffffffffbb172c40, 
March 19 06:36:40 NN kernel: chv_gpio_irqchip+0x0/0x120
March 19 06:36:40 NN kernel: ->action():           (null)
March 19 06:36:40 NN kernel:    IRQ_NOPROBE set
March 19 06:36:40 NN kernel: irq 115, desc: ffff9b91f5df8200, depth: 1, count: 0, unhandled: 0
March 19 06:36:40 NN kernel: ->handle_irq():  ffffffffb9ee8f70, 
March 19 06:36:40 NN kernel: handle_bad_irq+0x0/0x230
March 19 06:36:40 NN kernel: ->irq_data.chip(): ffffffffbb172c40, 
March 19 06:36:40 NN kernel: chv_gpio_irqchip+0x0/0x120