Linux 5.5 Lands Fix For Booting New AMD Ryzen Threadripper Processors Without MCE Hang

The AMD machine check exception (MCE) code fix for Linux has landed ahead of this weekend's anticipated 5.5-rc3 release. This AMD MCE fix allows for the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3900 series processors introduced last month to boot the Linux kernel without hangs or other workarounds.

The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X / 3970X on Linux is beautifully fast but sadly out-of-the-box would not boot the Linux kernel due to an MCE error. Fortunately, there is an easy workaround to use for booting the Linux kernel by disabling MCE while now for Linux 5.5 (and to hopefully back-ported stat to current stable series) is a proper fix.

Nearly one month to the day since these high-end desktop/workstation processors launched, the fix was merged today along with some other AMD RAS fixes.

So if using Linux 5.5 Git today or a release of Linux 5.5-rc3 or later, the new Threadripper processors should be running fine out-of-the-box.