OK, it's really called Intel NUC 6i5SYK. A nice small machine that can be used as an office server, personal computer, or a media center. The reason why the title of this page is "Intel Nuke" is because it managed to crash and then brick itself just by running standard software. Fortunately it could be unbricked again. But unfortunately the story still didn't end well. Read to the end for details.
Note: It's been four years since I last built a computer from parts * or even bought a computer at all that isn't a cloud server, mobile phone, raspberry pi, or something that contains a microcontroller. So I had forgotten how tricky it can be sometimes to get Linux to run on new hardware.
(*) This is also my first Intel build since 2003.
Unfortunately, this computer is not out-of-the-box compatible with Linux (as of December 2016). Some non-trivial tweaking is needed to make it work.
Here is what happened:
At first I had no problems at all. I wrote the Ubuntu Server 16.04.1 LTS installer to a USB stick, and successfully installed it to the internal SSD drive. Then I added a few packages and configured the wifi network, and then I was busy with other things for a while so the system was running (but idle) for about 4 days before I continued working on it. No stability issues of any kind at this point.
Then I added X11 and ALSA to get graphics and audio working. Still no problems for about two days.
Then suddenly I noticed that the machine had shut down spontaneously (while doing nothing), and when I restarted it there was a machine check panic early in the boot sequence. I went through all the normal procedures, including rescue boot, overnight memory test, reseating RAM and SSD in their sockets, booting without SSD, restoring BIOS to factory defaults, updating the BIOS firmware, etc. Nothing helped. And I still have no idea why it suddenly switched from booting nicely every time, to not booting at all.
After some googling and experimentation I finally got the machine to boot by adding
intel_idle.max_cstate=1
to the kernel command-line in the grub bootloader... WTF? I didn't even know there was a
Linux kernel module name intel_idle. Why on earth would something like that
be needed in order to make a machine boot?
With this setting everything seemed to be stable again until I started X11. That resulted in more machine check panics, immediately on starting the Xorg process. At one point the machine even bricked itself after reboot, by getting stuck in the BIOS boot screen. Then it got stuck there everytime I power-cycled it. Fortunately it could be unbricked again by clearing the
"CMOS"
(or
Parameter RAM
which is the correct terminology). But the X11 problem still remained afterwards. Changing the graphics driver from i915 to fbdev worked however (but without graphics acceleration), so it was obvious that the problem was related to the i915 kernel driver. After some more googling and experimentation (including upgrading the kernel) it turned out that adding the kernel option i915.enable_rc6=0 made X11 work again. Yay!
So in summary, here is what worked for me. But there is no guarantee that it will work for you. You have been warned.
intel_idle.max_cstate=1 i915.enable_rc6=0 to the kernel command line. Then after a successful boot, add the same options to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX in the file /etc/default/grub, and then do sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg to make this permanent.
Not sure if the last two upgrades are necessary, but I'm not in the mood to downgrade any of them just to figure that out. And anyway, the fact that this Intel NUC hardware runs into problems when running a standard Linux distribution is a sign that the hardware isn't quite mature yet. It's still bleeding-edge experimental hardware.
The machine has stopped working. First it dropped all audio, then it crashed with a machine check on every boot attempt. I'm retiring the box, it's the worst piece of crap I have encountered in many years. And I don't intend to replace it with any new Intel NUC. Watch this space for the replacement hardware.