Conversation

Charlotte 🦝 therian

where is the article about gigabyte mobos bricking arch linux after turning on secure boot? or msi motherboards bricking arch linux after a bios update?

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i swear 2/3 of my x86 hardware has firmware bugs that result in “system is unbootable” when doing completely normal enthusiast things like “setting up secureboot” or “updating the bios”

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extending to systems i had to manage before that grows to around 4/5 with definite firmware bugs, although only 3/5 where the system could become unbootable for some reason

my dad’s PC’s thermal sensors claim subambient temperatures on air cooling, my brother’s PC firmware cannot talk to the monitor it shipped with and it takes until windows reinitializes the screen for you to be able to see anything (you might see why that would be a problem if for any reason i need to change a bios setting or boot into a usb flash drive…)

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and the last device is a lenovo business laptop that has such great features as “being able to boot from any source except for the usb card reader it shipped with of course” with firmware still being distributed on CD despite the device not having a cd drive (at least they don’t do the windows thing where it doesn’t boot if you put the iso on a usb stick…)

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the gigabyte mobo also has such great features such as “shipping broken ACPI tables” because of course it would just ship broken ACPI tables. their firmware team literally has one job and instead of shipping working firmware they came up with the worst RGB LED settings menu in history

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oh and another definite firmware bug is that secureboot is turned off when you clear cmos. definitely glad that i didn’t have to RMA the mobo but at the same time like

why the fuck would you do that

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might one of these bugs be fixed if you updated the firmware? yes. but i also do not trust gigabyte’s firmware updater given that their 13th public bios revision is so critically broken

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oh actually i just remembered that my laptop does have a firmware bug. sometimes when resuming to suspend it just doesn’t, it starts rapidly blinking the power LEDs, but at least usually you can recover the unsuspend by pressing the power button for a few seconds

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oh that reminds me that my last gigabyte mainboard had the firmware just crash outright when certain USB devices were connected

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like pc firmware has a gigantic qa problem and the last time i remember there being a firmware bug getting a news cycle on pc was an asus firmware bug literally melting your CPU and starting a fire so uhh

i take a bricked os any day
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oh and another issue i remember from my last gigabyte board is that xhci handoff was just broken on windows 7 (which was completely reasonable to use in 2014 because fuck windows 8)

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@charlotte My old work laptop would fail to start up the wifi card if it was connected to power during boot, but that may have been a Linux issue more than a firmware issue.
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