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

more than 50 per cent full = fail is bad

[Joe_Dragon]

more than 50 per cent full = fail is bad and Samsung needs to come out with a bios update to fix that.

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

[broken_chaos]

They didn't even test the UEFI nvram (not a partition) filling up. If they had, they would have seen that, oh, wow, it bricks the laptop entirely.

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

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It was probably very well intentioned - to avoid the UEFI partition becoming full and causing errors.

Are you not seeing the insanity of avoiding errors caused by being 100% full by bricking the device at 50% full?

More broadly, for what possible reason would Samsung handle UEFI storage in such a fucked-up way? How many decades now have we had computers with some sort of mass-storage device that had to be treated sanely?

Re:That's great, but can they be fixed once bricke

[LordLucless]

If they can, they weren't bricked in the first place. That's what "bricked" means.