Linux Bricks Some UEFI Samsung Laptops

Generating a fair amount of attention today is word that when booting modern versions of Ubuntu -- and other Linux distributions -- on Samsung laptops that utilize UEFI, Linux can actually brick the system. There's now an urgent Linux kernel patch underway.

The Samsung UEFI Linux bricking issue has been known going back to last summer per LaunchPad Bug 1040557:

I cannot provide detailed log massages because laptop is bricked right now.

If you have courage to try it select UEFI boot from bios and than try to boot laptop using liveusb (made form Precise Pangolin 12.04.1 amd64).

Laptop hangs up in black screen. If you force power-off, after it, laptop wont start. I mean it not event start bios, just black screen no sounds nothing.

I filing this report, because i already bricked second laptop. At first i thought it was unrelated issue and laptop was fixed by warranty service (replaced motherboard), but after second time i quite sure.

Others have confirmed this issue too and it's affected both Ubuntu 12.04 and Ubuntu 12.10. The aforementioned bug report has been very active going back to last summer and it's accumulated more than 129 comments and confirmation of the issue affecting at least three dozen users and likely many more.

Hitting the kernel mailing list just now is an urgent patch for disabling samsung-laptop on EFI hardware. "It has been reported that running this driver on some Samsung laptops with EFI can cause those machines to become bricked."

The samsung-laptop Linux kernel driver has been reported to cause Machine Check Exceptions, so the workaround for now is disabling it from being used on EFI-enabled Samsung laptops. That's it for now.