Ubuntu 17.10 Temporarily Pulled Due To A BIOS Corrupting Problem

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu 17.10 Temporarily Pulled Due To A BIOS Corrupting Problem

Canonical has temporarily pulled the download links for Ubuntu 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" from the Ubuntu website due to ongoing reports of some laptops finding their BIOS corrupted after installing this latest Ubuntu release. The issue is appearing most frequently with Lenovo laptops but there are also reports of issues with other laptop vendors as well...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-17.10-BIOS-Corrupter

[FirstPersonBSOD]

*Patiently waiting for a rant from birdie*

(don't take this seriously, some of his comments are actually right)

[Brisse]

Ouch...

[PluMGMK]

Well this can't be good for the reputation of "desktop Linux". What's the purpose of the SPI driver supposed to be?

[Michael]

Well this can't be good for the reputation of "desktop Linux". What's the purpose of the SPI driver supposed to be?

FTA: "The Intel SPI kernel driver is responsible for reading/writing to SPI serial flash. Due to the SPI serial flash holding the BIOS and other platform specific data, Intel's driver is supposed to make the contents read-only, but clearly something is going awry with the driver in 17.10."

[PluMGMK]

So why is Ubuntu interested in reading/writing to the SPI serial flash? Or is it just supposed to protect it?

[bregma]

SO, this is a bug in the generic Linux kernel, and not specific to Ubuntu in any way other than being in the Linux kernel distributed with Ubuntu 17.10 as well as used elsewhere?

[Guest]

*Patiently waiting for a rant from birdie*

(don't take this seriously, some of his comments are actually right)

birdie is full of shit.

http://windowsreport.com/bios-corruption-windows-10/

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/insider/forum/insider_wintp-insider_install/windows-10-update-resulted-in-corrupt-bios/c5dad174-e4c7-4cf6-94ff-6d82b03dec2c?auth=1

However, when comes to Ubuntu it seems they lack proper QA.

[eydee]

However, when comes to Ubuntu it seems they lack proper QA.

Ubuntu installer still asks you to type mount points with special characters before even asking for the keyboard layout. Because they assume everyone's using US keyboard. It's telling a lot about QA.

[speculatrix]

could it be the way that UEFI variables are being accessed? that the vendor has taken some short cuts and used the same chip for both UEFI firmware or BIOS, and the non-volatile UEFI settings?