System stability with the 6th generation (Skylake)

[mikemex]

Hi fellas,

As some of you may know already, I decided to ditch most of my classic Thinkpads (an heresy, I know, but they often end up in the hands of friends and relatives fully upgraded, so not that much of a loss) and replaced them with more "modern" models.

By modern I mean 6th Skylake. I've got a couple of full ATX desktops, a bunch of M900 Tiny micro desktops and a bunch of X1 Carbon 4th generation. I choose this generation because:

1) They are quite cheap by now, and still pretty powerful and modern. This generation runs M.2 SSDs and WIFI cards, for example.
2) They are capable of running Windows 7, which I still do.

Problem is, I've been reading that this generation was notoriously buggy from start, so much that intel halted the production at some point. Now, in 2022, I would assume most bugs have been found and fixed with microcode upgrades (the last one was issued in the late 2021) but I'm still concerned about it.

I know Firefox isn't the paramount of stability (specially if you switch to a new version right away) but I've been having some constant crashes that I didn't experience with my old desktop (Haswell). With that one I could keep the PC literately on for weeks and it ran just fine. But with the X1C4, which is the machine I've been using the most lately, I get a crash almost daily. I even saw some weird crashes with the GPU (it just keeps running with the screen off; I even managed to "revive it" connecting an external monitor).

The first thing that comes to mind is: maybe the X1 is bad? Well, I've got three of them with identical configurations and I've rotated them and found the same results. Needless to say, I've ran memtest on all them to rule out bad memory and the like. But I'm still unable to determine what's the source of the crashes.

I must say, this is something that happens only sporadically and I kind of feel it's related to Firefox running out of memory (to protect the SSD from too much writes, I've got into the habit of disabling disk cache on all my machines). But I've never actually seen the machine run out memory (X1C4s have 16GB).

Could it be an intrinsic instability of this generation? I've not seen that many people running 6th around here.

[mikemex]

Well, intel keeps releasing microcode updates for Skylake (don't forget to update your BIOS if you have one of such machines), the latest this very month, so either intel still cares a lot for this platform (say, it launched a deep investigation that will serve as a reference to avoid future issues), or it's really bad for some applications and it got into serious liabilities. I know for sure that the discovery of of the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities contributed heavily to intel's decision to delete the drivers for all the "legacy" devices from their servers.

I also read in the news some time ago that they finished porting some code for Chrome OS to run Linux applications on Skylake based Chromeboks.

[RealBlackStuff]

Have you tried this 'branch' of Firefox: https://classic.waterfox.net/
I run it (64-bit) in W7 on my T440p and M900 without any problems.

[benlimanto]

I think you should try again, constant crash with Firefox could be a problem with the driver, but as I see with my colleague, I don't see any crash since last 101-102 Update from Firefox, and some point the crash can be out of ram, so I constantly removing unusable tabs using Simple Tab Groups, or you can sleep the tab, you can do whatever you can to try that extends. Also there are support sub reddit for Firefox on /r/firefox.