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Ubuntu 17.10 Temporarily Pulled Due To A BIOS Corrupting Problem

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  • #51
    Originally posted by BaronHK View Post
    ...

    I guess maybe the lesson is, avoid clean installs. Try installing one distro, staying with it, and dist-upgrading from there. Clean install only as a last resort. We don't know how many you get before your Lenovo nvram turns into nvrom. :/


    Yet it sounds for now rather just like plain accusations (lack of proof). And Lenovo is not the only vendor affected by the bug in question btw.

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    • #52
      Originally posted by pq1930562 View Post

      No, humbug is absolutely correct and you F.Ultra have absolutely no idea what you are talking about:

      http://linuxbsdos.com/2014/06/02/how...efi-boot-menu/
      https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Efibootmgr
      He was talking about BIOS, UEFI is a whole other topic since you create boot entries via a standard there which you cannot do under BIOS.

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      • #53
        Originally posted by sverris View Post



        Yet it sounds for now rather just like plain accusations (lack of proof). And Lenovo is not the only vendor affected by the bug in question btw.
        Well, there are only two possibilities here. Lenovo's Dirty Tricks Squad is back at it. (They are the company that brought you Superfish and the bloatware resinstalling BIOS.) -or- They really do produce garbage and it's because of stunning incompetence.

        Either way, "Get a Dell." seems to be a better option than sitting around waiting for Lenovo to screw us again.

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        • #54
          hey michael, pity you did not let readers know earlier. i tweeted you about this more than 14 days ago

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          • #55
            I'm a diehard Ubuntu user but Canonical deserves to be skewered for this. They are obviously doing something different with the latest builds of 17.10 then they were doing with the first builds of 17.10 that were released a while ago and something different from all previous versions of Ubuntu and all other distros. I just don't see why developers decide to change things in such a way that it actually damages hardware.

            The sad thing is this isn't the first time something like this has happened in the Linux world, remember back in the Mandrake days:





            Author: Joe Barr As reported yesterday on Slashdot, MandrakeSoft has found a serious problem when using Mandrake Linux 9.2 with some models of CD-Rom drives made by LG Electronics. Updated The errata page describes the following scenario: “Installing 9.2 and being told unable to install the base system and subsequent reboot reveals that CD-ROM is …


            The sad thing is that instead of manning up and admitting they fucked up the Mandrake developers, and their users/supporters/ pointed the finger at the hardware itself, claiming that the firmware was buggy. Of course none of them had any explanation as to the obvious questions their excuse raised, such as if the firmware was "buggy" then why is it this "bug" didn't occur with any other distro or even any other Mandrake release, such as 9.1, it only happened with 9.2 during the install process.

            How is Linux as a whole ever supposed to be taken seriously if even in 2017 we have a supposedly premium distro that bricks hardware?

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            • #56
              Second time AFAIK when Linux has killed off hardware it was being installed on. Previous time it was systemd allowing
              rm -rf /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/
              So, small summary of things..

              affected distros: Ubuntu 17.10, Antergos and possibly all others that had this SPI option enabled in kernel?

              Affected brands: Lenovo, Acer, possibly also HP?
              Last edited by aht0; 20 December 2017, 08:52 PM.

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              • #57
                Originally posted by Spooktra View Post
                [...]and their users/supporters/ pointed the finger at the hardware itself, claiming that the firmware was buggy. Of course none of them had any explanation as to the obvious questions their excuse raised, such as if the firmware was "buggy" then why is it this "bug" didn't occur with any other distro or even any other Mandrake release[...]
                Name ONE time that installing any OS, ANY OS at all, on a PC BIOS system bricked the motherboard. This has simply never been an issue before uEFI came along, and then we had those Samsung uEFI systems getting bricked and it turned out that even Windows could do it under certain circumstances. This is most likely some variant on "uEFI is bloated and full of crap and one of its 'features' is getting crapped up in a way that would have been impossible before...'".

                Can you actually point to a kernel patch that ONLY Ubuntu is using that affects the way it interacts with the firmware? Because I doubt you can. 1. Canonical doesn't work on that level (at least not from what I've seen.) and 2. Why the hell would they?

                I doubt you can pin this down to anything other than uEFI is hell on wheels and Lenovo is just producing garbage as usual.

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                • #58
                  “Lenovo is just producing garbage as usual.”
                  Guys like Louis Rossmann worship Lenovo.

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                  • #59
                    Originally posted by Pawlerson View Post

                    birdie is full of shit.

                    If you're encountering BIOS corruption on Windows 10, first reflash your BIOS, then remove your motherboard battery and reset your BIOS.


                    However, when comes to Ubuntu it seems they lack proper QA.
                    You're full of shit. The link talks about how to fix a BIOS corruption using Windows 10. Not that some bug in Windows 10 caused the BIOS corruption. This is straight out FUD against Windows.

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                    • #60
                      Documentation for the Intel SPI driver is here:

                      Linux kernel source tree. Contribute to torvalds/linux development by creating an account on GitHub.


                      It looks like this driver provides the ability to do a BIOS update from Linux without any special boot media on a few systems. On others, it was supposed to mark the non-volatile area read-only but instead corrupted it.

                      The documentation mentions the possibility of using DediProg equipment to recover from issues like this one (DediProg is an IC programmer that costs over $200), but that seems a rather complex solution, especially since many motherboards are actually cheaper.

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