Comment 76 for bug 1829620

I can confirm all said before. In my case my laptop is an ASUS VivoBook S14 S430FA. I bought it 2 days ago 'cause it was a cheep nice laptop with just what I needed, and did came with a preinstalled linux (Endless), so I could guess that it had to work properly in another Linux like Xubuntu (I'm on Xubuntu 18.04.2 both in my desktop and now in my new laptop). Could not expect this problems, but finaly it's working fine, and everything works like a charm from hardware side, as intended.

I had a very hard time to get it running, and reinstalled thousand times the whole system (with encrypted HD or not), till I could guess the problem started when updating some packages, among them the intel-microcode. But I was not sure which one exactly was (or had the time for more trials), though I suspect this one could be THE one. Fortunately, I just found that the lowlatency kernels did work!

So, probably the lowlatency are not injecting the intel-microcode code, which could perhaps be thought as a new bug, but for me was a real blessing.

I do work with audio usually, but never had the real need of a RT kernel, so I'm pleased to have find this and being able to go back to standard kernel.

For my laptop there is no new BIOS by ASUS by now (still on 300), so I have to use workarounds I or II, both work fine. For more comfort, I use the second one, the pinned package, so that it will be easy so see when a new one comes, and try if it solves or not the problem.

And I tend to think that an outdated intel-microcode (for the infamous spectre and meltdown intel failure) is better than no microcode applied. Or is not the way it works? Should I choose the I option or it's the same?

Anyway, thanks a lot, and, if you come in trouble again with that, remember that the lowlatency kernel does not suffer this problems, you don't need an "exotic" kernel, just one at hand... (I'm keeping the 4.18 lowlatency kernel just in case, while using the 5.00 generic, so that it defaults to generic, but have my second option just in case something fails again, or just I feel the need at any point for a RT kernel)

BTW: I was unable to boot ever from a 19.04 ubuntu version (nor Xubuntu, nor Ubuntu, nor Lubuntu). That was another trial I was at after being pissed by the bizarre problem for a number of times. But never got a simple booting from pendrive with any xUbuntu 19.04. And it seems logical now, probably the intel-microcode is yet included in the images. Probably I could have used the I workaround, but I didn't find this page till now. Anyway, I prefer to keep at LTS just not to be updating each 6 months...