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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) by boltronics on Friday September 23 2016, @02:50AM
For some types of oddball hardware, sure. Bumblebee comes to mind.
But storage? I can't remember the last time a GNU/Linux install didn't work with some kind of storage device. Heck, I don't think that's ever been a problem for me in the ~18 years of using it.
Why Lenovo didn't just include an option to switch off RAID might well have been related to an agreement with Microsoft.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
(Score: 5, Informative) by TheGratefulNet on Friday September 23 2016, @03:18AM
I recently bought some nvme ssd modules in m.2 format and plugged into a passive pci-e adapter card.
now, this isn't scsi or sata - its all new, this nvme stuff. you really can't just call it like scsi and in fact its not /dev/sdaX (etc). no, not even /dev/hda, lol.
its /dev/nvme0n1p1 and windows7 won't install to it, even with 'floppy drivers' (double lol).
pulled down the latest MINT, booted an opto cd on the sata bus and the installer not only saw the nvme device as a bootable disk, it really did setup grub (etc etc) and the thing Just Plain Works(tm). I'm using it now, with hdparm showing 1000mb/sec speed, give or take.
point is: linux installs and sees stuff that even MS os's can't. this is on a haswell mobo, so its not very current but its still recent enough that it can work with some very new hardware. the bios saw the device but I cannot get win7 to see it as an installable or a restorable. I think win8 and 10 can install there, but its kind of funny that win7 just won't. I gave up trying. I'm using it as a linux box, only, now; not a dual boot system like it used to be.
they didn't ADD raid; they spent time/money/engineering on REMOVING ahci! and that's fucking evil.
if it had ahci it would be installable and visible to any os.
microsoft seems the most guilty here. they are doing all sorts of fucked up shit trying to force win10 on people. I see this as absolutely yet another example. lenovo is not innocent, but MS is the one who forced this.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23 2016, @04:25AM
> they didn't ADD raid; they spent time/money/engineering on REMOVING ahci! and that's fucking evil.
To be fair it is probably just a build flag. So really minimal effort required.
And if you think about from a mindset of forgetting that linux exists, it makes sense.
Its one less knob for an unsophisticated user to fiddle with and end up causing a support call.
Think of it as systemic racism against linux, nobody is out to hurt linux, they just don't consider linux when making their decisions and the end result is that linux ends up fucked.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23 2016, @05:48AM
nobody is out to hurt linux
Do some reading pal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23 2016, @01:36PM
Aspie literalism for the fail.
(1) Those are nearly 20 years old now
(2) Hyperbole learn how it works.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday September 23 2016, @02:37PM
Microsoft Loves Linux
And . . .
Sharks Love Fish
Foxes Love Chickens
etc.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23 2016, @03:47PM
Its your kind of stupid that guarantees ineffectiveness in actually combating the problems of being the underdog.
Far easier to believe in conspiracy than banality. But banality is endemic and automatic and is thus the far greater threat.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday September 23 2016, @10:16PM
Believing in conspiracy? this is WITNESSING it.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by boltronics on Friday September 23 2016, @04:27AM
Yep, that's right.
I personally have two M.2 drives in my desktop running Debian. When I first set it up, I had them running using software RAID0 (via mdadm) and LUKS, with LVM2 over the top. No problems since day 1.
Lenovo did have a choice though. Nobody put a gun to their head. In the end, they thought the hit to their reputation was worth the money they could make.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Friday September 23 2016, @06:11AM
"they didn't ADD raid; they spent time/money/engineering on REMOVING ahci! and that's fucking evil."
Yep.
"microsoft seems the most guilty here. they are doing all sorts of fucked up shit trying to force win10 on people."
In all sorts of little ways. I have a new Acer machine that came with Win10 pre-installed. It took me most of a day to figure out how to get Linux to install, because the secure boot + GPT was pretty locked down. There's just no reason not to allow a user to turn off secure boot (if they want). Alternatively, there ought to be some way to install a second boot key for Linux, rather than running everything through MS.
By making it so difficult, any casual user will find it impossible to install a non-MS operating system. This is not an accident, and one can be pretty sure that Acer was paid for their cooperation...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Friday September 23 2016, @08:44AM
Be fair, Win 7 is 7 years old and out of support (unless you have extended support contract), no surprise it won't see new hw - a 7yr old Linux probably won't see it either.
Now going back to the Lenovo laptops in question, apparently even the latest Windows won't install either, because of lack of driver support. Now, probably if you can get hold of the drivers and slipstream them into the install it might work, but it is also possible that the only way to (re)install Windows on these boxes is to use the Lenovo recovery partition, which would likely be nuked if you switch the drive out of raid mode. My guess is they locked out that bios setting to prevent users accidentally nuking the recovery partition.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23 2016, @03:28AM
But storage? I can't remember the last time a GNU/Linux install didn't work with some kind of storage device. Heck, I don't think that's ever been a problem for me in the ~18 years of using it.
I remember when Linux didn't support SATA because SATA was too new. I remember having data destroyed by a shitty Firewire driver because I tried to run RAID1 across Firewire. I remember when I resorted to software RAID across IDE because IDE drivers were actually mature enough to work without causing kernel panics all the time.
Your 18 years of inexperience isn't worth fucking shit, apparently.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Friday September 23 2016, @04:03AM
Oh I know it happens here in penguin land too. I had a Promise IDE RAID card that was rock solid on RHEL/WHEL 3 and 4. Hell, I -built- WBEL4 on it. But sometime around the Fedora 7 period the kernel would see it and shit all over the filesystem if I was dumb enough to mount it rw when testing. For awhile I could get a source tree from Promise to build with some manual patching, it was a lot slower but didn't corrupt data so the only winning move. Eventually that too wasn't possible any longer and it was time to toss the card, the now obsolete drives and cage and get on with life.
But of course the odds are a lot lower of getting hosed like that on Linux, the tales of woe from Windows land of hardware being thrown into landfills because Windows + 1 didn't support the stuff are legion. You are dependent on either Microsoft caring enough to make the driver or a vendor writing one for an out of production device... which rarely if ever happens.
But the tell on this article that is is pure marketing bullcrap is "our industry-leading 360-hinge design in the best way possible we have used a storage controller mode" which makes me reach for the duct tape to keep my head from 'sploding. WTF?
(Score: 2) by Marand on Friday September 23 2016, @04:19AM
I remember when Linux didn't support SATA because SATA was too new. I remember having data destroyed by a shitty Firewire driver because I tried to run RAID1 across Firewire. I remember when I resorted to software RAID across IDE because IDE drivers were actually mature enough to work without causing kernel panics all the time.
Your 18 years of inexperience isn't worth fucking shit, apparently.
And I remember a Windows installation within a decade ago completely trashing a drive's contents because the installer didn't understand SATA but also didn't state that it didn't. Instead of complaining about unsupported hardware it tried to install anyway, trashing everything on the disk. Grandparent poster gave in to hyperbole a bit, but the basic point is sound: storage has been pretty well solved and usable in OSes for many years. Even with SSDs the difficulty came with using them efficiently rather than being unable to use them at all. This is a shitty situation created by a bad decision by a company, not a problem with any specific OS.
---
If anyone's curious, the rest of the mini-story about Windows and SATA: after the initial data destruction, I got a driver disc and tried to use that during install attempt #2, but of course it wouldn't work because the installer only accepted drivers from floppies. I hadn't had a computer with a floppy drive in years at that point, so it looked like I was going to end up having to get the newly-released shitshow that was Vista, or deal with trying to find a copy of XP that had SATA drivers on-disc.
I decided it wasn't worth the bullshit and my dual-boot system turned into Debian-only. I'd only been using Windows for games anyway, so it wasn't a huge loss. Later on, I stuck Win7 on a small HD I salvaged from another system for occasional gaming, but the damage was done. I went from regular dual booting to going months between boots. :P