Slashdot Mirror
Foxconn Releases Test BIOS Fixing Linux Crashes
Ryan1984 writes "Only a week after the bad press coverage regarding the Linux-related bugs in a number of motherboards released by Foxconn (which turned out to be the AMI BIOS that several board makers use), Foxconn is the first vendor out with a publicly released test patch that fixes the bulk of the problems, allowing kernel 2.6.26 to run well on the afflicted boards. The remaining issues appear to either be kernel bugs in builds earlier than 2.6.26, issues with the Intel chipset itself, or minor annoyances that Foxconn is still working to resolve. Foxconn representative Heart Zhang has posted on the Ubuntu forums (where the situation began), apologizing for the issues, thanking Foxconn customers and the community at-large for their feedback, and promising that Foxconn will take Linux support and testing seriously, going forward."
move along, nothing to see here, here kiddies *candy* now go away.
Not forgiven.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Did anyone notice that this, purportedly official, apology was nowhere close to good English? If they can't write English, they can't write code... ok, that's not entirely fair, but they won't be getting many more sales in English-speaking countries if they WIDELY release statements like that.
How can a motherboard manufacturer support Linux, when Linux doesn't want to be supported? The Linux kernel makes a point of not providing any guaranteed behaviour, and there's a ton of different kernel versions out there, and that's not counting all the different vendor-patched variants.
The only sane thing to do is what is already done, ie. for motherboard vendors to test and support operating systems with guaranteed stable functionality (eg. no patch will change how Windows XP interacts with the BIOS) and for Linux to lie about its identity to get the motherboard into a known state.