Intel Laptop Users Should Avoid Linux 5.19.12 To Avoid Potentially Damaging The Display

[Luke]

There is a reason Debian Unstable is named "Sid." It's right there on their website, with all the Toy Story names Sid is the kid that breaks things. Also the very name "Unstable" is a warning to new users. It's for folks who know what they are doing-and if it didn't exist there'd be nobody to test all this stuff before it gets to stable.

I have a known good backup snapshot of my OS on my main system drive, and multiple data backups.Never had a kernel bug eat a filesystem, but had multiple disk failures and a wrong-device dd eat a few filesystems. Copying back a BIG filesystem can be quite time consuming after such an incident but you don't lose data because you never have it all mounted at once and never have all of it on the same device.

I always tell windows users to treat ransomware as though a power surge ate their system and data discs and someone put new ones in: in the end, the results are the same and SHIT HAPPENS. One person gets ransomware, another gets a bad HDD from the vendor, yet another gets kernel issues. Displays too get trashed from many things. You can be very careful to use only stable kernels, only to sit on the bag containing your laptop by mistake.

I found out the hard way that some Chromebooks once ChromeOS is removed and a real Linux distro installed have a nasty firmware bug/feature: if you accidently press the spacebar pre-boot, the firmware will re-lock the boot loader and you cannot boot. If you don't have and cannot find(or cannot download due to bandwidth) a recovery image, the system can be consided "soft-bricked" from ONE accidental keypress. Even if you do, setup is a total do-over unless you keep the OS and everything else on external media and don't use the internal drive at all. That's because it will wipe (or is supposed to wipe) everything you wrote to the system drive. Those Chromebooks that act that way really should be reflashed with vanilla coreboot before use.

[Chugworth]

I wonder what are the specifics of the chips or screens that were affected. I was running that version for a couple of days on my ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9 (Core i7-1165G7) and didn't notice anything odd.

[CTTY]

Remember when these good old stable distros made systems unbootable?
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ub...st/005549.html

I had luck, because my server (and machines I administrate) did not automatically install these update and reboot in that short period, but it would have been a disaster because I was miles away.

[CTTY]

On my arch linux machine I use A/B-style squashfs images. So if there is a problem, I can go back to the last working state.

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/verify-squash-root

[macemoneta]

Well that's fun. Fedora and Tumbleweed are both on 5.19.12.

Fedora has 5.19.13 in testing, or you can pull it from Koji.

[macemoneta]

I found out the hard way that some Chromebooks once ChromeOS is removed and a real Linux distro installed have a nasty firmware bug/feature: if you accidently press the spacebar pre-boot, the firmware will re-lock the boot loader and you cannot boot.

That is, of course, an "off label" use of a Chromebook; you have to disable the write protection and security to install a new BIOS and OS. However, that also means your device only supports the legacy BIOS, not the replacement UEFI, which doesn't have that issue. Many Chromebooks (50 new models) were added to UEFI support recently, so you may want to update to see if you now have the option of UEFI installation.

[piorunz]

Haha more bleeding edge drama

Manjaro Shipped Broken Kernel on Apple M1 Systems

I don't know how people can stand this in long term. Windows 98 was more stable.

[Luke]

That is, of course, an "off label" use of a Chromebook; you have to disable the write protection and security to install a new BIOS and OS. However, that also means your device only supports the legacy BIOS, not the replacement UEFI, which doesn't have that issue. Many Chromebooks (50 new models) were added to UEFI support recently, so you may want to update to see if you now have the option of UEFI installation.

Legacy BIOS (via compatablity mode in UEFI boards or SeaBIOS in that Chromebook) is all I have ever used. The problem with the Chromebook firmware on that generation is that the write protection and security are automatically re-enabled if you accidently press the space bar prior to boot, and cannot be re-disabled except from inside ChromeOS, which has been removed. This is chicken-and-egg and a "soft-brick." I deemed that too big a hassle (could lose the OS while deployed to out of town protests/direct actions away from my desktop) and replaced the machine with a UEFI laptop of a model from which I could get to the UEFI screen without ever activating or running Windows. This was checked online prior to purchase. I still have the Chromebook,replacing the Chrome version of Coreboot with upstream Coreboot would fix the spacebar antifeature but I was living off-grid,with limited solar power to run the desktop and needed to work fast and simple. I was at the limits of cell coverage, have never had a landline, so downloading a massive multi-GB recovery image wasn't really an option.Would be a LOT of driving in that area to find a wi-fi connection big enough for that job

[sophisticles]

Sadly this isn't the first time Linux, or a linux based OS, has destroyed hardware:

https://lwn.net/Articles/55537/

https://www.linux.com/news/mandrake-92-may-kill-lg-cd-rom-drives/

[mppix]

So will stable release distros, except breakages will occur only at certain time points and with a much higher chance as you'll update everything at once.

I still have to break Debian stable (with backports). Flatpak really helps having up-to-date applications and not needing to install 3rd party apps by unsupported means.

Number one way to break (any?) stable release was still the Nvidia driver. Hopefully that changes now with >515.x