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Lenovo has confirmed that several of its Yoga laptops are refusing to install Linux-based operating systems. The Chinese firm said the issue had been caused by its switch to a new storage system, which reads and records data faster than normal.
There had been confusion after one of its employees posted that Linux was blocked because of an "agreement with Microsoft". However, Lenovo has denied enforcing a deliberate ban.
The restriction affects PCs sold with the "signature edition" of Windows 10. The term refers to a promise that "junk" software is not pre-installed alongside the OS to avoid slowing down its operation.
The Lenovo rep's response (linked to in the excerpt) seems to have been given before the company PR people got involved.
Hot Hardware , offers an alternative perspective:
Yesterday, Lenovo confirmed that Linux cannot be installed on the machine because there are no OS-specific drivers for the device's proprietary RAID configuration. Given that this machine has been designed to work with Windows 10, it should come as no surprise that Lenovo probably didn't want to devote too much of its resources to developing alternative drivers for this particular model.
To be more specific, Lenovo had this to say:
To support our Yoga products and our industry-leading 360-hinge design in the best way possible we have used a storage controller mode that is unfortunately not supported by Linux and as a result, does not allow Linux to be installed. Beyond the controller setup limitation, other advanced capabilities of the Yoga design would likely not work with current Linux offerings.
Lenovo does not intentionally block customers using other operating systems such as Linux on Yoga or any of its devices and is fully committed to providing Linux certifications and installation guidance on a wide range of suitable products.
In a statement provided to The Register , Lenovo further clarified its position on RAID support in Linux for the Yoga 900, writing, "Unsupported models will rely on Linux operating system vendors releasing new kernel and drivers to support features such as RAID on SSD."
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Friday September 23 2016, @02:01AM
Code for "Microsoft exclusive"?
Obviously, they knew ahead of time that alternative OS's wouldn't have that driver. What other "advanced capabilities"? Microsoft telemetry, maybe?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by TheGratefulNet on Friday September 23 2016, @02:10AM
having an ide or sata interface with fakeraid is fine; but I have NEVER seen a controller that didn't ALSO have ahci as a choosable mode.
cue the apologists who would say 'but a user might enter bios mode and change that, making the system unbootable!'
yeah, you can screw up lots of things in bios. then lock ALL of bios, then, if that's the issue you care about.
making a drive controller NOT support ahci is absurd beyond belief. 100% chance MS and lenovo conspired to make this harder for linux, with ZERO technical reason. in fact, you would have to SPEND MONEY to remove the ahci feature since that's the default and fakeraid is always an add-on.
absurd. the consumer version of lenovo has fully jumped the shark. I still am ok with business grade lenovos (generally) but I'd never touch a consumer grade one.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Friday September 23 2016, @02:22AM
Personally, I've never seen a good reason for RAID on a laptop. RAID doesn't even make much sense on most desktops. To me, it's an important server feature, but completely unessential for the average user. So, in effect, Lenovo implemented a server feature on a laptop, which just happens to break *nix compatibility?
Yeah, I'm with you on the conspiracy thing.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by TheGratefulNet on Friday September 23 2016, @02:23AM
more so - a CONSUMER grade lappie with - RAID - really??
absurd beyond the pale.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23 2016, @02:59AM
To be fair, everything coming out of Lenovo since 2008 or so has been a steaming pile of consumer-grade shit, Thinkpads included. Lenovo got big because people heard that Thinkpads were good and wrongly assumed that still held true and that it carried over to the rest of their product line.
They ruined the Thinkpad line, they ruined what was left of Motorola after Google sold it (namely, a stock Android experience with promise of monthly updates) and now they are shitting all over Linux. This, combined wih turning Thinkvantage drivers into bloatware and getting caught three times in one year injecting malware on products sold to consumers including hiding it in he fucking BIOS so it would come back if you did a clean install ... Lenovo is either grossly incompetent or actively malicious against their consumers.
Why the fuck do people keep parroting the old, "Get a lenovo" line anymore?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by lentilla on Friday September 23 2016, @04:43AM
There is a saying "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king".
So:
Why the fuck do people keep parroting the old, "Get a lenovo" line anymore?
Likely because Lenovo has been consistently at least as good, if not better than the competition.
Purchasing a laptop is a crap-shoot at the best of times. Using Lenovo as a baseline is as good a place to start as any.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23 2016, @07:54AM
Asus and Acer are good enough and have gotten better. Build quality has gone up for most laptops as SSD, fanless, and Ultrabook features have been adopted. There's no reason to stick with Lenovo if you don't like their practices, and everyone else has not heard of the issues and doesn't care about Linux.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23 2016, @01:45PM
Not really. Your comment just shows that you really haven't been paying attention. You are coming from a place of ignorance, which only spreads mis-information regarding Lenovo.
At no point since the Lenovo acquisition, has a Lenovo machine lead benchmarks in its class. Since 2008, Lenovo has systematically shed every trace of the IBM-acquired Thinkpad except for the name (T61 - rollcage in the lid removed and removal of all IPS displays; T500 - 5:4 and 4:3 ratios removed; T510 - 16:10 replaced with 16:9 ratio; T520 - same as T510 except option for AES-NI added; T530 - removal of 7-row keyboard layout and replacement with chiclet keys; T540 - removal of the track point buttons, Thinkpads slate grey instead of black, removal of centered keyboards and trackpads to add a number pad). Meanwhile, during this same span, we've seen HP's Dreamcolor display become the industry standard for high-quality displays in a laptop instead of Flexview; the return of consumer-grade IPS displays starting with the Macbook Pro in 2012 and quickly replicated elsewhere; the option of non-widescreen displays on options from Google and Microsoft; the addition of captive screws for easier repair on the Latitude and Elitebook lines; Dell workstation-class laptops becoming as thin as the Macbook Air while offering Xeon processors WITHOUT throttling or the cooling issues that plague the W530 and up Thinkpads while also retaining properly centered keyboards and trackpads for better ergonomics. We've seen Lenovo try to remain relevant with the re-introduction of the P50 and P70 only to see them have poorly designed cooling systems and cheap TN-quality displays. We've seen Dell open a github repository with open-source drivers for their Linux-based laptops, while Lenovo doubled-down on Microsoft. And this is all *before* the hidden malware in the BIOS, the acknowledged certificate hijacking and now not playing nice with Linux users. Why are you still recommending them over anything else? Post-purchase rationalization? What is the matter with you?
Lenovo has become a consumer-grade company. This is a result of the Lenovo acquisition, and paranoia over Chinese backdoors causing government and corporate to abandon anything labeled "Think" over the past decade. Is that really warranted? Probably not. Not really Lenovo's fault, but they were abandoned by anybody important and are now following the money by targeting consumers instead of the business world; unfortunately, that market is a race to the bottom.
TL;DR - everybody else got better while Lenovo got worse. Stop apeing the old "Lenovo is good" garbage.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Friday September 23 2016, @12:03PM
I agree with you. I've had Thinkpads the last 15 years after too many bad experiences with Dells and HPs. My IBM Thinkpad was great, and the best laptop I ever owned; I actually formed an emotional attachment to the thing, which is something I never do with machines. The first Lenovo laptop was fine, but lesser than the IBM one. The one I'm on now is a step down from the last Lenovo laptop. The trend is clear.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday September 23 2016, @05:29AM
The "R" of course is short for "redundant." While I've not personally experienced a failed SSD, I've read in online forums that when they fail, they can suddenly become totally unreadable—a more troublesome failure mode than what usually happens to mechanical drives, in which only a portion of the drive becomes unusable. Assuming that's true, a RAID configuration that allows one drive to fail completely without loss of data strikes me as something that could be worthwhile. Because an SSD consumes so little power, I would expect an extra drive to have little effect on battery life, although if it were in the form of a 2.5-inch drive it would add noticeably to bulk and size. Personally, I wouldn't mind the burden.
Laptops with a single "hard drive" bay are the norm, but having two bays is nothing new (how many this Lenovo has, I don't know).
The added reliability possible with RAID could be more valuable in a consumer laptop than in a server. A server is typically kept indoors with power conditioning, filtered air, and controlled temperature and humidity. Often there's someone tending to it, who may make regular backups of its data and check SMART messages. The "life" of a laptop can be like: used at café, coffee spilled on keyboard; used outdoors, rain falls on keyboard; left in the driveway, driven over by car; carried in backpack, zipper opens and laptop falls to pavement. I don't perceive consumers as keeping thorough backups or keeping aware of the condition of their computers. RAID could provide extra reliability that could lessen the chance of data loss for them.
(Score: 2) by Bogsnoticus on Friday September 23 2016, @06:57AM
>"Laptops with a single "hard drive" bay are the norm, but having two bays is nothing new (how many this Lenovo has, I don't know)."
According to the spec sheet, it has one drive bay.
So there is no benefit to having it hard-coded to a single drive raid array compared to having it set to ahci. Which begs the question, if there is no real performance benefit, why do it except to screw with linux?
Genius by birth. Evil by choice.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday September 23 2016, @10:51AM
The specifications I found say "Hard Drive 256GB PCIe SSD" which could be a single card; I didn't see a mention of a drive bay.
http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/yoga/900-series/yoga-900-13/ [lenovo.com]
It does seem bizarre that they'd have a "RAID" consisting of one storage device.
I happened upon a discussion in the company's Web forum.
https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Linux-Discussion/Yoga-900-13ISK2-BIOS-update-for-setting-RAID-mode-for-missing/td-p/3339206 [lenovo.com]
There's also a discussion on Reddit, where a poster says that European versions of the computer allow use of AHCI, and says that someone has reflashed a (U.S., I assume) Yoga 900 to enable AHCI.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/542c8t/hardware_hack_enables_linux_support_on_lenovo/ [reddit.com]
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23 2016, @04:29AM
I've never seen a good reason for hardware raid in general, especially proprietary hardware raid. Coupled with the fact that this is on a consumer notebook, no AHCI support due to yet another bonkers UEFI implementation and I'm left wondering what the hell the people at Lenovo must be smoking.
Don't buy Lenovo is all I can say. I never will...
Don't get me started on the fact that Intel can't seem to make chips that won't "melt" without proprietary firmware blobs.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by MadTinfoilHatter on Friday September 23 2016, @05:53AM
I've never seen a good reason for RAID on a laptop.
The reason they gave here was that the default Windows driver had poor power management, and using the fakeraid forced the use of the Intel driver (with supposedly superior) management, so it's actually a clunky workaround for a Windows problem. Of course, even if true, that would only explain why this mode was the default - it wouldn't explain why the AHCI was removed from BIOS altogether. As these guys [bios-mods.com] demonstrated reactivating the option is entirely feasible (and would be trivial for Lenovo) and when activated the laptop works just fine. Unfortunately hacking the BIOS, if you're not Lenovo is a PITA, and requires specialized hardware and even soldering. [imgur.com] This really seems like a fuckup of proportions where it's difficult to attribute things to stupidity, and you have to start looking at the malice option - even more so given the official Lenovo "solution". [lenovo.com]
(Score: 2) by Zz9zZ on Friday September 23 2016, @07:42PM
Hanlon's razor isn't the best tool, as this situation shows. Nowadays there are plenty of malicious actors doing things for their own ends, especially in the computer/software world. Its time to stop apologizing and realize that we are letting things pass that should have us organizing the metaphorical lynch mob.
~Tilting at windmills~
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23 2016, @10:44AM
I trust Nick Heath and Jack Wallen over at TechRepublic to get the story right.
Here's Jack's ideas on this: Lenovo sucks at making BIOSes. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [techrepublic.com]
.
This reminds me of Foxconn and ACPI back in 2008. [1] [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [slashdot.org]
[1] hansraj is down past the point where highlighting works, but there's some other stuff up the (meta)thread that is marked.
...and, with everybody on their case, they straightened that out post haste. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [slashdot.org]
...and, in 2013, Samsung coded a UEFI that was easily overwritten and which screwed up things for Linux.
...and they had done sucky testing on that.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by fubari on Friday September 23 2016, @06:17PM
Runaway wrote: "Personally, I've never seen a good reason for RAID on a laptop"
For average users, I agree with you... but it is nice to have the option.
For power users there are some good reasons (like video editing, or maybe running 3+ vm's on large data sets in my situation), RAID is a nice option.
The advances in drive interfaces (like this: Samsung: new m2 ssds [anandtech.com] ) seems like it will make raid in workstations less useful in the future. (Then again, data and programs expand to use available resources...).
My current (4 year old) work laptop has 5 drive bays (3 sata, 2 m2) and I get a nice speedup with RAID in that. The current generation of crazy-fast M2 devices weren't on the market then, so I'm running 3x450mb ssd's in raid 0 (pleasingly fast, and Yes, I do have a rigorous backup schedule thank you for asking). Also has 32gb ram, I really like this laptop :-)
Given that the CPU clock wars are over, my machines have a longer lifespan these days... upgrades driven more by advances in storage now that processor.
My next laptop (in 6 to 12 months) will likely have a pair of hopped up m2 ssds, one for os one for vms.
Also highly unlikely it will be be a Lenovo. :-)
(Score: 1) by petecox on Friday September 23 2016, @03:16AM
Bricking a computer by messing with the BIOS settings shouldn't be an issue if there's a 'reset to factory settings' button.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday September 23 2016, @04:57AM
Since only the CPU on-die temperature sensor can do a forced shutdown, most machines can be smoked out by selectively over-clocking everything except the CPU from the UEFI menu.
As for the general population, a schoolyard bricking routine is to disable the USB ports and boot device. You'd be amazed how many tablets and laptops end up in craigslist or in the dumpster over the owner failing to reset their bios by misreading the instructions and thinking the motherboard battery is the laptop's battery.
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23 2016, @05:52AM
ricking a computer by messing with the BIOS settings shouldn't be an issue if there's a 'reset to factory settings' button.
Yeah, you say that! But what if 'reset to factory settings' fucks you up the arse? What then, Mr. Microsoft Shill, you? I beat upon you with my puny fists! You monster you!
(Score: 2) by Bogsnoticus on Friday September 23 2016, @06:59AM
Oh, shut up Donald.
Genius by birth. Evil by choice.