Intel Bay Trail CPU C-states issue

Devices with Intel Bay Trail CPUs have been affected by this bug which has been known to cause seemingly random freezes of the system. The bug has been reported to have been fixed, or at least mitigated, in Linux kernel version 5. Should random freezes still occur, the only work around which has been reported to work consistently is setting the intel_idle.max_cstate=1 kernel parameter which has the drawback of increasing power consumption considerably.

To temporary set this parameter at boot (e.g. when using the Debian installer or at the very first boot of the system), when in Grub press "e" after selecting the entry you want to boot and then add the parameter at the end of the "linux..." line.

To permanently set this parameter, add the file /etc/default/grub.d/intel-bay-trail-cstate-issue.cfg containing these lines:

# Prevent random freezes on Intel Bay Trail CPUs
# WARNING: increases power consumption considerably
# https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/PageFragmentIntelBayTrailCStateIssue
# https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=109051
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="$GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX intel_idle.max_cstate=1"

then update grub with:

$ sudo update-grub