Matthew Garrett Has a Fix To Prevent Bricked UEFI Linux Laptops

hypnosec writes "UEFI guru Matthew Garrett, who cleared the Linux kernel in Samsung laptop bricking issues, has come to rescue beleaguered users by offering a survival guide enabling them to avoid similar issues. According to Garrett, storage space constraints in UEFI storage variables is the reason Samsung laptops end up bricking themselves. Garrett said that if the storage space utilized by the UEFI firmware is more than 50 percent full, the laptop will refuse to start and ends up being bricked. To prevent this from happening, he has provided a Kernel patch."

Comments

Re:problem fixed?

[cheater512]

No the bricked laptops are still bricked. This just stops more laptops from falling to the same bug.

Re:more than 50 per cent full = fail is bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember, if Apple hasn't done anything wrong, you can take something somebody else did, and pretend they did it even worse! That's how evil Apple is!

And in most cases it would be absolutely true, no pretending about it.

No...Bad Unified Extensible Firmware Interface

[tuppe666]

The UEF Interface seems to work just fine with Win OS and iOS. How is that a bios problem?

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2027819/not-just-linux-windows-can-brick-samsung-laptops-too.html No bad on Windows too.

Please don't quote other peoples comments as fact, I suggest you check out the reply to it.

As for the Mass Migration to Linux, that happened with Android, which is set to become the most installed OS this year.

Re:When you go Linux....

[Cito]

You can sometimes on many "bricked" devices like linksys router bricks after borking a dd-wrt install
and on the samsung laptops as well by playing with the jtag

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Test_Action_Group

most stuff has jtag support and in some cases you can use the jtag header to unbrick a device.

I've unbricked an old WRT54GL after a screwup I did on an older dd-wrt install few years ago using jtag.

it's not something a normal user would be able to do or have confidence in doing, so yea in most cases the normal user will never unbrick.

Re:Bad Unified Extensible Firmware Interface...or?

[fluffy99]

It's been demonstrated that this bug can be elicited from Windows as well. And Windows expects to be able to write even more info than Linux was. Linux was just the first to expose the problem by trying to use UEFI variables to hold kernel panic info (Apple does something similar). IT didn't help that the UEFI driver itself caused the kernel panic, after which the kernel writes some debug log info to the UEFI to support later postmortem analysis.

Re:more than 50 per cent full = fail is bad

[ais523]

The same bug can brick Samsung laptops on Windows too. It's just that it was noticed on Linux first.