Clever Geek Handbook

Ubuntu 17.10 crashes BIOS on some Lenovo, Acer and Toshiba laptops

Canonical has withdrawn the Ubuntu 17.10 distribution that came out in October and hid the link on the download site . The reason was a critical bug with BIOS damage in some models of Lenovo laptops and one Acer model. The full list of affected models is currently being updated and updated.



The damage to the BIOS is manifested in the fact that the new settings can no longer be saved, and after a reboot, the laptop starts with the old settings.



Worse, the boot from a USB stick is breaking as USB is not recognized.



Judging by the description of the bug, it seems to happen after activating the intel-spi- * drivers in the kernel. Apparently, these drivers are not yet fully developed and are not ready for use on user systems.



As a workaround, you can try to disable the drivers intel-spi- *. In the description of the bug it is noted that the consequences of such actions will be minimal: "It is unlikely that someone really does something that requires this driver."



List of affected laptop models:





As already noted, the list is updated.



In the comments to the bug, the Toshiba L50B-23G model is also mentioned.



In numerous forums, users complain about this problem, because many laptops do not have CD-ROM drives - so they can not boot from another distribution.



Especially a lot of complaints on the Lenovo forums. This is especially unpleasant, because often Lenovo ThinkPad notebooks are often recommended for use with Linux, and at Canonical at offsite they are included in the list of officially supported hardware.



In previous versions of Ubuntu, the bug does not appear.



Theoretically, the BIOS can be reflashed and returned to its original state (for example, using a programmer), but this is a nontrivial and slightly risky procedure. In addition, not every user has a programmer. Therefore, you can understand the strong discontent of those who are faced with this problem and can not download a laptop. "This is unacceptable, right now my Lenovo G50-80 has turned into a brick," writes one of the victims in the comments to the bug on the Canonical site.



UPD. User's note r0mik in the comments to the article: “it is not BIOS that is corrupted” in the literal sense - the SPI Flash chip is locked to the record. Apparently, this happens through the aforementioned kernel module, since only he is capable of such actions (for this, including, and was written). It is precisely from the fact that SPI Flash is hardware locked up for writing that no means of rolling back to the standard BIOS settings will work, because the settings are stored in SPI Flash. The programmer will not help either. It will only help the physical replacement of the chip ...


Canonical Lenovo, . Ubuntu 17.10 , BIOS .



, , Ubuntu 17.10 BIOS. — . - , , Lenovo.



BIOS USB. EFI. :



efibootmgr -v







:



BootCurrent: 0001

Timeout: 0 seconds

BootOrder: 0001,0002,2001,2002,2003

Boot0001* antergos_grub HD(1,GPT,f128f12b-fa3e-45b1-b5c9-f03c328498cb,0x800,0x64000)/File(\EFI\antergos_grub\grubx64.efi)

Boot0002* Windows Boot Manager HD(1,GPT,f128f12b-fa3e-45b1-b5c9-f03c328498cb,0x800,0x64000)/File(\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi)RC

Boot2001* EFI USB Device RC

Boot2002* EFI DVD/CDROM RC

Boot2003* EFI Network RC







, - grubx64.efi antergos_grub .



, , antergos_grub. rEFInd, refind_x64.efi grubx64.efi. rEFInd.


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