Thanks, the dmesg outputs are enough as a start. The first one is at intel_idle driver while the second one looks different, at first emitting ehci_suspend error (-EBUSY) then it got MCE. Basically both indicate something in a deeper level than the normal kernel crash. One big question I forgot: is this a regression from earlier kernels? In anyway, one easy thing to be tested is to disable the idle and cpu freq drivers. Try to pass the following boot options: intel_idle.max_cstate=1 intel_pstate=disable These will disable the fine power tuning, so it would consume more power, but it's interesting to see whether they influence on the behavior.