[GTALUG] "Ubuntu 17.10 Temporarily Pulled Due To A BIOS Corrupting Problem"

D. Hugh Redelmeier hugh at mimosa.com
Mon Dec 25 17:24:54 EST 2017


<https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-17.10-BIOS-Corrupter>
<https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1734147>
This is scary but hard to evaluate.

The best guess is that there is an oddity in the Lenovo firmware that 
interacts with a recent Linux kernel change in a bad way.

- it is not specific to Ubuntu: it also effects some Acer, Toshiba, Dell, 
  and other notebooks.  See the list in the Launchpad report.

- Maybe the problem is fixed by this or something related
<https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/d9018976cdb6eefc62a7ba79a405f6c9661b08a7>

We should let wizards work on this.

If it hits you, it seems that your current setup will be very important to 
preserve until there is a fix.  In particular, you will only be able to 
boot from the current boot entry, and that means your EFI partition's 
GUUID is important and the path to the .efi file (shim?) that gets booted 
is important.  If you wipe your disk you may never be able to boot again.

Much of this is guesswork on my part.


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