[kwlug-disc] Fwd: "Ubuntu 17.10 Temporarily Pulled Due To A BIOS Corrupting Problem"

[Bob Jonkman]

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- From the GTALUG mailing list:


- -------- Forwarded Message --------
Date: Mon, 25 Dec 2017 17:24:54 -0500 (EST)
To: Toronto Linux Users Group <talk at gtalug.org>
Subject: [GTALUG] "Ubuntu 17.10 Temporarily Pulled Due To A BIOS
Corrupting Problem"
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From: D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

<https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-17.10-BIOS-Corrupter>
<https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1734147>
This is scary but hard to evaluate.

The best guess is that there is an oddity in the Lenovo firmware that
interacts with a recent Linux kernel change in a bad way.

- - it is not specific to Ubuntu: it also effects some Acer, Toshiba,
Dell,   and other notebooks.  See the list in the Launchpad report.

- - Maybe the problem is fixed by this or something related
<https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/d9018976cdb6eefc62a7ba79a405f6c9661b08a7>

We should let wizards work on this.

If it hits you, it seems that your current setup will be very
important to preserve until there is a fix.  In particular, you will
only be able to boot from the current boot entry, and that means your
EFI partition's GUUID is important and the path to the .efi file
(shim?) that gets booted is important.  If you wipe your disk you may
never be able to boot again.

Much of this is guesswork on my part.
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