Ubuntu
linux package

  1. Bug #1734147
  2. Comment #169

Comment 169 for bug 1734147

Revision history for this message
Paul Sladen (sladen) wrote : Re: Ubuntu 17.10 corrupting BIOS - many LENOVO laptops models

[The two theories provided by Mika Westerberg, verbatim]

"""
Instead I have a theory since as far as I know there have been to kinds
of issues.

  1. Flash is left locked. This makes the BIOS impossible to save
     settings.

  This seems to happen only for GigaDevice flashes and for all of those
  there is this flag in "spi-nor.c" set: SPI_NOR_HAS_LOCK.

  Normally Linux only reads JEDEC ID of the chip and nothing else.
  However, in this case it may be possible that Linux does unlock +
  operation + lock which leaves the flash locked and confuses BIOS.

  2. Flash corrupted

  We've seen once on Apollo Lake systems where the BIOS image had
  configured to use Quad mode instead of Single but the chip was
  connected only with single data lane or so. Trying to access the flash
  using HW sequencer then does damage to the chip because it is in wrong
  mode. This only happened with certain Winbond chips.

In any case it would require some more analysis to find the root cause.
"""