Ubuntu 17.10 Temporarily Pulled Due To A BIOS Corrupting Problem (phoronix.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Canonical has temporarily pulled the download links for Ubuntu 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" from the Ubuntu website due to ongoing reports of some laptops finding their BIOS corrupted after installing this latest Ubuntu release. The issue is appearing most frequently with Lenovo laptops but there are also reports of issues with other laptop vendors as well. This issue appears to stem from the Intel SPI driver in the 17.10's Linux 4.13 kernel corrupting the BIOS for a select number of laptop motherboards. Canonical is aware of this issue and is planning to disable the Intel SPI drivers in their kernel builds. Canonical's hardware enablement team has already verified this works around the problem, but doesn't provide any benefit if your BIOS is already corrupted.

Comments

Re:which is to blame Linux or Lenovo?

[omnichad]

From the Canonical bug report:
At least on Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga, the BIOS seems to monitor the SPI-NOR
write protection bit and if it is flipped to read/write it assumes the
BIOS configuration was changed on next reboot. It then, for unknown
reasons, resets the BIOS settings back to default.

That's not the same problem

[drinkypoo]

I finally checked the warranty and saw it was 14 months old so took it apart, removed the battery and motherboard battery, left it for an hour, powered it on, flattened the partition table an reinstalled. Works perfectly again, but after a huge amount of time wasted.

If removing the batteries solved the problem, then your problem wasn't BIOS. It was CMOS. The "CMOS RAM" is the volatile memory which stores settings used by the BIOS. The BIOS itself is stored in non-volatile memory. This was originally a PROM in the IBM PC, but today is pretty much always Flash ROM. Sometimes it's a flat quad package, sometimes it's a serial 8-pin DIP and it has to be shadowed into RAM just to function, but it's pretty much always flash. (Those ones are cool because they're usually socketed, and SPI-interfaced, which means they're useful for other projects...)