Meltdown & Specter vulnerabilities patches cause problems with downloading Ubuntu 16.04

Users of Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 who recently installed updates against vulnerabilities Meltdown and Specter report that they were unable to boot their systems and are forced to roll back to earlier images of Linux kernels.

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

All users who have problems report that it has become impossible to boot after upgrading to kernel 4.4.0-108.
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“I was updated in the morning to 4.4.0-108-generic and there was a problem with the download,” said user Punit Patpatia earlier today.

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

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

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

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

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