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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."
Someone find a 1st level Cleric so they can cast Protection from Evil on these Lawful Good CD-ROMs. That should keep the evil Mandrakes from destroying them.
At least they should get a freakin' saving throw. What a harsh DM.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
...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.
appears to be a kernel patch
I found this post.
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."
> If Windows would do this to your drive there would be a public outcry. Here on /. it is more like "ah well, shit happens, it's mentioned in the errata so suck
>
> it up and get over it".
But windows could do this. All it would have to do is send one of the two normal APATI commands to this cdrom drive, and it will fry just the same.
LG stated the bug is in their cdrom drive, and one of two commands sent to it will execute the buggy routine in firmware, causing it to dump its firmware totally.
They cant be fixed because to flash firmware, you have to use a program that is in the firmware in the first place.
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.
Already been done. "Back in the day", there were plenty of virus written that would throw your monitor out of sync, simply baking the tube.
Some others that whould smash the read/write heads of your HDD into the spindle destroying the drive, that's why it's controlled at the hardware level now. That was back when the heads actually required a seperate program to park them. That was alot of fun.
I'd say that Mandrake is responsable for the replacement of those drives.
Om, nomnomnom...
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.
...but they should have advised the users of certain models of their drives to check and possibly update the drive firmware.
The thing which kills the drives is - wait for it - setting them up for packet writing. The hackers who made the patch to do this (included starting with Mandrake 9.2rc1) may be able to figure out a way to do it without triggering LG's bug, or may not, in which case any Linux kernel which features this packet writing code will kill a broken LG drive.
Note that this happens when the drive is init'ed, not when you write a CD with one, so you'll kill a drive just as effectively even if you install over the network or whatever.
As to responsibility, well... the drive software is broken, end of story. If your LG drive dies, take it back and make a warranty claim.
For those who assert that Mandrake should have tested 9.2 on every known drive before releasing it, the answer is that Mandrake did indeed test 9.2 on these models of LG drives, but none of their testers happened to have the broken firmware revision(s). <shrug>
For those speculating about what would happen if it had been MS-Windows-XP's problem instead, the only differences would have been that more than 80% of all broken LG drives would have been killed by now due to semi-forced upgrades, Penguinistas would have been gleefully rejoicing that their software didn't kill drives, and Microsoft would still be ignoring the problem and we'd expect them to for at least another two weeks.
I don't know whether it's possible to flash a killed drive's firmware and resurrect it, or whether the broken firmware actually destroys hardware.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing