The current state of UEFI and Linux
Feb. 1st, 2013 12:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mjg59Executive summary: Most things work fine.
Things we know are broken:
Not an amazingly positive list, but as far as I know that's about it - other than some Samsungs, one range of Toshibas and one range of Lenovo desktops, Linux should be fine. If you have any other UEFI system that's unable to install Fedora 18, let me know and we'll do our best to work out what's going on.
Things we know are broken:
- Some Samsung laptops. The samsung-laptop driver is a slightly weird thing. By 2010 (when it first appeared) most vendors had moved over to using some level of firmware abstraction, either using ACPI or WMI. Samsung still seemed to be stuck around a decade earlier - they were providing a region of memory at a known address, and you'd read that address to find a bunch of offsets. Then you'd write magic values based on those offsets to magic system IO ports based on those offsets and something would happen. Those writes were triggering System Management Mode, a special x86 CPU mode where the processor executes code from memory that the OS can't see, without telling the OS that it's doing so. There's nothing especially new in this (SMM first appeared in the 386sl back in 1990), but it also means that you depend on the system vendor not changing the interface without telling you. Turns out that Samsung apparently changed their platform interface when they moved to UEFI, but didn't actually do anything to prevent old drivers from breaking things - performing exactly the same series of accesses on some modern Samsung laptops gives an uncorrectable machine check exception (in the best case) or destroys your firmware (in the worst case). Given that the driver was written to Samsung's specifications, this is pretty obviously Samsung's fault, but that's probably little consolation to anyone who ended up with a dead laptop. Although, given Samsung's track record, this may not be surprising.
On the bright side, some of the machines that are affected by this predate Secure Boot, so at least it's not a Secure Boot bug. - Some Toshibas won't boot Linux. This turns out to be some staggering incompetence on the part of Toshiba (or, more likely, their third-party vendor) - they managed to leave the signing key out of the database that's used to validate binaries, and managed to leave the signature database signing key out of the database that's used to provide whitelist or blacklist updates. The good news is that this is a blatant violation of Microsoft's Windows 8 certification guidelines, and that seems to have encouraged Toshiba to actually fix their BIOS. The bad news is that any of the affected machines that are currently available are still broken, and Toshiba don't seem to be willing to actually give you the firmware update yet.
- Some Lenovos will only boot Windows or Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I recommend drinking, because as far as I know they haven't actually got around to doing anything useful about this yet.
Not an amazingly positive list, but as far as I know that's about it - other than some Samsungs, one range of Toshibas and one range of Lenovo desktops, Linux should be fine. If you have any other UEFI system that's unable to install Fedora 18, let me know and we'll do our best to work out what's going on.
Trusted Boot
Date: 2013-02-01 07:09 am (UTC)Please help :)
Re: Trusted Boot
Date: 2013-02-01 07:32 am (UTC)Re: Trusted Boot
Date: 2013-06-28 02:18 pm (UTC)Re: Trusted Boot
Date: 2013-06-28 02:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-01 09:42 am (UTC)Basically the Kernel "oopsed" and when i rebooted the motherboard turned out fried. At the time i did not report it because i did not have much information about the event and i was, and i am, still not sure what happened. Now that i read about the Samsung issue i find that very familiar. Anyway, fortunately my D30 was still under warranty and i was not able to reproduce after it was repaired.
I also was not able to boot Fedora 18 UEFI installation on both my D30 as well as my X220. I use to have Fedora 16 installed in UEFI mode and it worked fine. In Fedora 18 i was not able to make that work. When i press the Fedora item from the UEFI menu nothing happens (Nothing bootable found). It might just be me but even if so, i guess it is not as intuitive as it could be.
Some Lenovos will only boot Windows or Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Date: 2013-02-01 11:44 am (UTC)Remove Invalid Boot Options
In case you have it enabled remove it. The "funny" thing with a firmware like this is that it autodetects all known positions of efi binaries. Like when you use the name:
EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi
it will detect Windows Boot Manager. Nice to convert normal to UEFI installs...
Re: Some Lenovos will only boot Windows or Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Date: 2013-02-01 05:50 pm (UTC)AMI/Asrock UEFI Secure Boot Bugs
Date: 2013-02-01 12:07 pm (UTC)Re: AMI/Asrock UEFI Secure Boot Bugs
Date: 2013-02-01 03:10 pm (UTC)Does the samsung issue also exist in CSM mode?
Date: 2013-02-01 06:29 pm (UTC)Does this mean the issue is only with samsung-laptop or are there other parts of the kernel that will also cause these issues?
Does turning off UEFI (and switching to CSM/legacy mode) stop this problem?
Re: Does the samsung issue also exist in CSM mode?
Date: 2013-02-01 06:38 pm (UTC)Re: Does the samsung issue also exist in CSM mode?
Date: 2013-02-03 06:23 am (UTC)http://www.jakobheinemann.de/en/blog.html
Fedora 28 does not work with Sony VAIO
Date: 2013-02-02 03:39 am (UTC)Re: Fedora 28 does not work with Sony VAIO
Date: 2013-02-02 03:57 am (UTC)Re: Fedora 28 does not work with Sony VAIO
Date: 2013-02-02 04:09 am (UTC)Boot from Fedora 18 full DVD and install it with secure boot and UEFI mode enabled.
Installs without a problem.
Reboot and goes to Windows 8 without asking anything.
I installed Fedora 18 in legacy mode with windows 8, boots fine to fedora but Windows does not boot in legacy mode. I then change legacy to UEFI and Windows 8 is not there. There is message OS not found.
Changing back to legacy and booting to Fedora still works fine.
Ubuntu works fine with Windows 8.
Re: Fedora 28 does not work with Sony VAIO
Date: 2013-02-02 04:30 am (UTC)Re: Fedora 28 does not work with Sony VAIO
Date: 2013-02-02 04:40 am (UTC)The reason for closing the bug was: it is a boot loader problem.
Please see the bug description.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=906074
Re: Fedora 28 does not work with Sony VAIO
Date: 2013-02-04 09:54 am (UTC)Hold Shift when clicking "Restart" from within Windows 8, to get the Windows Boot Manager to show up - it should let you get into the UEFI settings screen, as a bare minimum.
Macbook 4,1
Date: 2013-02-02 04:14 am (UTC)The boot option shows four items, regular (Mac OS), Fedora 18, UEFI, UEFI (yep, shows it twice). I've tried all three and it never finishes booting. If you want more info let me know.
Re: Macbook 4,1
Date: 2013-02-02 04:29 am (UTC)Re: Macbook 4,1
Date: 2013-02-02 04:54 am (UTC)When I choose the "Fedora Media" option, it then goes to "Welcome to GRUB,
Then Grub menu (2.00) with "Fedora-18-x86_64-Live-Desktop.is" and "Verify and Boot Fedora-18-x86_64-Live-Desktop.is" options. I choose the first and then it said Booting 'Fedora-18-x86_64-Live-Desktop.is'. I see a steady cursor, and then after that, I just get a black screen.
I rebooted and tried verify instead, and it did the same thing.
Re: Macbook 4,1
Date: 2013-02-02 05:00 am (UTC)Re: Macbook 4,1
Date: 2013-02-02 05:11 am (UTC)Tried and after I hit F10 to boot, it says "Booting a command list" with a steady cursor, and then after a period of time, just a black screen.
I also tried removing "silent" to see if I could get any output, but nothing. I don't want to turn this into an unrelated support thread on you Matthew, so let me know if I need to take this elsewhere.
Re: Macbook 4,1
Date: 2013-02-02 07:02 am (UTC)Re: Macbook 4,1
Date: 2013-02-02 03:23 pm (UTC)Re: Macbook 4,1
Date: 2013-02-02 04:16 pm (UTC)Re: Macbook 4,1
Date: 2013-02-02 05:59 pm (UTC)BTW, thanks for the help and UEFI work :)
Re: Macbook 4,1
Date: 2013-02-02 04:59 am (UTC)I get "secure boot not enabled, welcome to GRUB!"
Then "GNU Grub Version 2.00" with two options (Fedora-18-x86_64-Live-Desktop.is and Verify and Boot Fedora-18-x86_64-Live-Desktop.is)
Choosing the first, I briefly see a solid cursor, then "Secure boot not enabled" with a solid cursor, then black screen.
I wonder with it saying ".is" instead of ".iso" is causing any problems?
Re: Macbook 4,1
Date: 2013-02-07 09:39 am (UTC)Colin Adams
no subject
Date: 2013-02-02 11:56 am (UTC)Samsung laptop issue
Date: 2013-02-02 01:20 pm (UTC)recommended vendors?
Date: 2013-02-03 03:33 am (UTC)Do ASUS, Gigabyte, SuperMicro, MSI motherboards raise your blood-alcohol levels at most to "jolly" or "slightly tipsy", or are they all more or less equally ravaging your liver?
Any trends at all in motherboard manufacturers' firmware quality?
PXE
Date: 2013-02-04 02:09 am (UTC)Toshiba's have a BIOS setting you can change
Date: 2013-02-05 01:41 am (UTC)Lenovo
Date: 2013-02-07 08:32 pm (UTC)I was stuck on the "secure boot" loop and came to this page for a solution.
I went into BIOS (F2) and rearranged my boot order and chose the USB stick as the first choice. It displayed the "secure boot" message, but then it went into the menu, and I was able to load Mint up.
Hope this helps.
Lenovo W520 was destroyed
Date: 2013-02-19 11:00 am (UTC)last year in march i boughta Lenovo W520.
When it arrived, i equiped it with 2 OCZ Vertex and one mSATA SSD insteat of the UMTS modem.
I wanted t olearn about the new UEFI world so i decided to do a Dual boot installation, Windows7 and opensuse 12.2 Tumbleweed.
I did the last updates for the hardware and set the notebook to UEFI boot.
Everythink went well, but after one week working with the noteboot i had the first boot problems, the kernel hang during boot.
One week later the W520 was not able to boot any more :NVRAM corrupted, and it wnt into a boot loop
I sent it back to Lenovo and 4 weeks later i got a new one.
But: Same procedure, after a good week: NVRAM corrupted.
The mainboard was changed then 3 times, every time after one week: NVRAM corrupted.
Last but not least i decided to give it a try with BIOS boot.
and, guess what: since 7 month the notebook runs smoothly.
I won't touch UEFI any more!
Re: Lenovo W520 was destroyed
Date: 2013-03-28 05:33 pm (UTC)It reminds me of a problem back when WordPerfect was king and Microsnot did ANYTHING to unseat it, in favor of their up-and-coming Word. If you installed WP first and Word afterward, WP could be counted on to fail because its code had been corrupted when Word installed or ran.
There have been other examples, evidenced on numerous forums.
Would MS deliberately sabotage other manufacturers' software, like introducing code that would trigger after a certain time? Has a cat got an ass?
What is needed is someone who can bust their balls to slap them with a meaningful fine - something like $1B/day until they correct the problem instead of the attaboy sized few hundred $M they got after years of wrangling in the courts.
Asus K55N won't boot anything in EFI mode...
Date: 2013-02-24 11:06 pm (UTC)Dual boot Windows 7 and Linux Mint
Date: 2013-03-29 03:33 pm (UTC)I recently installed both W7 and Mint 14 on a new Lenovo G580 laptop, it went straight through and Mint is a pleasure to use. The BIOS seems to have no UEFI or secure boot options.
Now I am trying to install Windows 7 on a Lenovo ThinkCentre Edge72 and have already wasted two days and exchanged it once.
I have paid good money for the thing and they have installed some new technology that makes it useless to me without any reference to it in the data sheet. I will return it.
Can anyone recommend a workstation/business type computer that I can still buy with a good old simple BIOS? According to technet, Windows 7 will install on that without problems.
Re: Dual boot Windows 7 and Linux Mint
Date: 2013-03-29 03:36 pm (UTC)Now I am trying to install Windows 7 and Mint 13 on a Lenovo ThinkCentre Edge72
Re: Dual boot Windows 7 and Linux Mint
Date: 2013-03-29 06:21 pm (UTC)I thought I would try once more.
Windows 7 and Mint 13 on a Lenovo ThinkCentre Edge72
Changed following in BIOS
startup bootmode --> legacy only
startup bootpriority --> legacy first
security secureboot --> disabled
and the installation of Win7 and Mint with a data partition in the middle went through and are selected in the grub menu.
Win7 gave a start error the first time but then started and didn't repeat the error
Re: Dual boot Windows 7 and Linux Mint
Date: 2014-07-10 03:32 am (UTC)Thanks and regards.
Re: Dual boot Windows 7 and Linux Mint
Date: 2014-09-25 02:22 pm (UTC)Violation of W8 Certification Guidelines
Date: 2013-09-17 10:53 am (UTC)Re: Violation of W8 Certification Guidelines
Date: 2013-09-17 03:49 pm (UTC)Re: Violation of W8 Certification Guidelines
Date: 2013-09-18 08:35 am (UTC)