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LG CD-ROMs Destroyed by Mandrake 9.2
An anonymous reader writes "The latest offering of Mandrake's distribution, 9.2, has been found to not only be incompatible with some LG CD-ROM drives, but to destroy them during the installation process. Mandrake have posted information on their errata page and further information can be found on this thread [google]. Along with over 350Mb of updates within a week of release, it's not been a good start for this latest release."
...and software is capable of destroying your products, you're fucking fired.
As for Mandrake, I'm sure that the updates are a good thing, unless they're stupid bugs that should have been fixed before release.
If you're a hardware manufacturer...and software is capable of destroying your products, you're fucking fired.
So how do you propose putting firmware updates into CD-ROM drives, DVD drives, modems, etc.? Just about any peripheral which has flashable firmware can be rendered unusable by software.
Dude, software should never be able to damage hardware. Not in 2003. Part of this is just common sense -- how could anyone design hardware that bad? But beyond that, it is only a matter of time before someone writes a virus that includes this cute little effect. It is no longer possible to blow up a CRT by giving it an out-of-range signal, or to call halt-and-catch-fire, or to blow up your car's engine by overreving it (assume you haven't screwed with the rev limiter). It is not okay for normal usage to damage hardware, and in the computer world 'normal usage' means any data at all, even malicious or (in the case of Mandrake, it seems) really bad data.
I've had this sig for three days.
If I try to tell my monitor to use a refresh rate that will damage it, it will tell me to screw off. My P4 will start to slow down, automatically, if it starts getting too hot, in order to keep it from burning out. Hardware suicide is more or less a thing of the past for a large portion of things.
I would consider it poor design on the part of the hardware manufacturer is something silly could burn it out. Are you telling me the next SoBig virus is going to make everyone's monitors explode?
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
Imagine if someone incorporated in the next big MS Windows virus an exploit for this vulnerability and destroyed thousands of LG CDROMS - what would LG have to say, I wonder.
I wonder how many folks here would be bitching out LG if it was XP that was trashing the hardware?
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
I just read a post from Alan Cox, it appears that if you send a flush cache command to the specific LG drives or their compaq rebadged ones, the drive gets fried. So this really has nothing to do with Mandrake and everything to do with a poorly designed drive.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Software != Firmware.
The mandrake problem doesn't have anything to do with firmware as far as I can tell, you just send a flush command to the drive, and it fails.
A simple software command should never, EVER be able to fry hardware. Screwing with the firmware is another problem entirely.
Then put a separate copy of the original firmware into read-only memory at manufacturing time and provide a physical button that writes the known good firmware over the current firmware...
Well, what I think will happen is that there will be more effort put into eliminating our choice as to what software we run on our PCs and what we use them for. After all, that's really what Palladium and "trusted computing" is all about. More FUD is on its way about how these "rogue" Linux systems can't be trusted not to burn up your equipment, etc. etc.
This will only fuel their "See, you lost a CD-ROM drive and because it's open-source, there's no one to cry to" argument.
Of course, practically speaking there is never anyone to cry to when hardware fails other than the hardware manufacturer, or your local retailer. This problem could easily have shown up in a Microsoft product first, since it is using a documented feature of the drive! There are reasonable limits you can expect software vendors to go to in testing hardware, given the vast number of products on the market. In any event, even if Windows did toast my drive (and I've had a couple mysteriously croak under Windows although I never suspected it was a firmware issue) I can't see Microsoft sending me a new drive, or for that matter ever admitting it was their fault! All the pro-Microsoft apologist trolls here on Slashdot can grumble all they want, but at least here the accountability trail is very complete (a definite plus for open source) and we'll be able to verify when and how the problem is fixed. Try doing that with Windows.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Mandrake actually tested on several broken models of LG drive, including one I own. It didn't kill any of them. Why not? Well, it turns out that none of the drives tested had the broken firmware revision(s).
Using your reasoning, Mandrake should have tested every single firmware release of every single model of every single piece of hardware that their OS interacts with - in all possible combinations - with every single subrelease of their own kernel. Got a spare aeon or two?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
With his problem, if the Mandrake installer is conforming to standards when accessing the drive, and the drive fails because it doen't meet those standards, then it's the drive at fault. If however, the Mandrake installer is pushing something too far and stepping outside the boundries the standard specifies, then Mandrake would be at fault.
It appears at this point that they (Mandrake) are still looking into which of the two above it is.
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