Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, SecretSquirrel, notfred
Phoronix wrote:Ryan Farmer wrote in explaining that his Yoga 900 ISK2 UltraBook hasn't been able to see Linux installed over a proprietary RAID mode that's locked by the UEFI/BIOS of this ultrabook: Linux can't see the SSD.
Waco wrote:Lenovo actually actively blocks access through various means.
JBI wrote:I've been saying that Linux evangelists can be their own worst enemy pretty much ever since I started using Linux...
just brew it! wrote:I've been saying that Linux evangelists can be their own worst enemy pretty much ever since I started using Linux...
just brew it! wrote:...Aside from the note from the Lenovo "Product Expert" (when someone has a title like that, it's a pretty good bet that they are anything but, and are very far down the food chain)...
DancinJack wrote:FWIW, I work on the Product team at a software company and have a somewhat similar title (thankfully not "expert"). I wouldn't generalize as much as you are here, with respect. There are some that are bad, some that are good, just like everything else.
But as it turns out, this sad little blog post was just the tip of the iceberg. It was based on a Reddit post, naturally, and reported elsewhere, and less sensationally, by ZDNet.
So is there something to this? Was Microsoft’s Signature PC team—the smallest freaking province in Terry Myerson’s Windows empire—actuallyrequiring Lenovo to “block” Linux? Was Microsoft?
LOL.
No. Come on, people.
Chrispy_ wrote:TL;DR, but aren't "Signature Editions" the same as regular editions but just without all the vendor bloat?
Chrispy_ wrote:If that's the case, what's to stop you from flashing the BIOS with the regular edition firmware?
The background is straightforward. Intel platforms allow the storage to be configured in two different ways - "standard" (normal AHCI on SATA systems, normal NVMe on NVMe systems) or "RAID". "RAID" mode is typically just changing the PCI IDs so that the normal drivers won't bind, ensuring that drivers that support the software RAID mode are used. Intel have not submitted any patches to Linux to support the "RAID" mode.
cheesyking wrote:The background is straightforward. Intel platforms allow the storage to be configured in two different ways - "standard" (normal AHCI on SATA systems, normal NVMe on NVMe systems) or "RAID". "RAID" mode is typically just changing the PCI IDs so that the normal drivers won't bind, ensuring that drivers that support the software RAID mode are used. Intel have not submitted any patches to Linux to support the "RAID" mode.
So it sounds like it might be possible to make linux use its standard driver with RAID mode just by adjusting the PCI IDs that it binds to.
Glorious wrote:I think the real reason Lenovo did this has to do power management, because on recent mobile packages there are interrelationships between storage and CPU power states. As in, if your controllers aren't configured the right way the CPU/overall IC will never go into the deeper power saving states (cheesyking might remember my post about our chromebooks--same sort of issue and it's even more complicated in broadwell/skylake packages). This is the primary reason, I'm sure: the "RAID" mode stuff is just the mechanism by which they ensure their windows driver with all those configs is loaded instead of something else.
torquer wrote:This just in: Windows hardware/driver support > Linux hardware/driver support
whm1974 wrote:In any case I'll still be building my systems in the future to avoid these kind of problems. It's a shame that FOSS OS users have to deal with these kind of issues.
Kretschmer wrote:whm1974 wrote:In any case I'll still be building my systems in the future to avoid these kind of problems. It's a shame that FOSS OS users have to deal with these kind of issues.
I feel terrible for all six of you.
whm1974 wrote:So Intel is to blame for Linux not installing on Lenovo notebooks and not Microsoft. Thanks a lot Intel:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3123075/ ... osoft.html
whm1974 wrote:I suppose this is one of the pitfalls of using a minority OS.