Ubuntu
linux-hwe-edge package

  1. Xenial (16.04)
  2. Bug #1734147
  3. Comment #173

Comment 173 for bug 1734147

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

Mika Westerberg emailed again with a pointer to the commit from a few months ago, specifically dealing with a similar issue on Lenovo Yoga machines:

"""
mfd: lpc_ich: Do not touch SPI-NOR write protection bit on Haswell/Broadwell

At least on Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga, the BIOS seems to monitor the SPI-NOR
write protection bit and if it is flipped to read/write it assumes the
BIOS configuration was changed on next reboot. It then, for unknown
reasons, resets the BIOS settings back to default.

We can prevent this by just leaving the write protection bit intact and
let the SPI-NOR driver know whether the device is writable or not. In
case of this particular Lenovo the SPI-NOR flash will be exposed as
read-only.
"""

  https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/d9018976cdb6eefc62a7ba79a405f6c9661b08a7

So, if the driver is disabled (such that it does not load), and two full reboots are performed afterwards. Is it then possible (on the third reboot) to make changes to the BIOS boot order again?