Last month was the controversy over some Lenovo Yoga laptops not working with Linux that was first alleged to be due to a Microsoft "Signature PC" requirement that later turned out to be incorrect. Well, the good news now is that Lenovo has issued a BIOS update and should allow for better Linux compatibility.
Following up on Last month's discussion.
(Score: 5, Informative) by MadTinfoilHatter on Saturday October 29 2016, @06:57AM
They screwed with it so the default windows drivers would not recognize it as an AHCI device. Apparently the default windows/intel drivers are buggy and this was their workaround.
That's the official claim, yes. The problem is that as I pointed out in the previous discussion about this: That's only a reason to change the BIOS default, not a reason to disable AHCI completely, which was what they did. In fact they seem to have even implemented some kind of check, so that even dropping to the UEFI shell and enabling it from there wouldn't work. If someone at Lenovo actually wrote extra code to make it impossible to enable AHCI, it make this a bona fide anti-feature. Make no mistake: Nobody except from Microsoft would benefit from having this feature disabled.
I'll say it again: The only party that had anything to gain from this (shady backroom deals notwithstanding) was Microsoft. They got to lock the user to their preferred version of their OS, and they got it without having to use draconian methods like UEFI bootloader signing, which might draw the attention of antitrust enforcement people in corners of the world they haven't yet been able to buy. This way it's: "Hey, it's Linux' own fault. It's missing the necessary driver." M$ have always been good at making others seem incompatible, and it saddens me that a large chunk of the media seems to have bought that excuse. [cio.com]
So why is that an excuse and the talk about RAID divers a red herring? Because the drivers here are not true RAID drivers - they're fakeraid drivers. Linux has never had much of a reason to implement fakeraid, because it already has a fully functioning softraid, and fakeraid doesn't really provide any benefit over that. If you have fakeraid you also have AHCI (in a sane backroom-dealings-free world anyway) and can just use that with softraid. Personally, I'm not taking off my tin foil hat just yet...
(Score: 3, Touché) by Marand on Saturday October 29 2016, @02:07PM
Commenter going by the alias MadTinfoilHatter chooses to fabricate elaborate shady back-room dealings and conspiracy theories instead of assuming someone just fucked up and did something dumb.
Yep, name checks out. Carry on. ;)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 29 2016, @11:55PM
are you unable to read? it's not "fucking up" if you go out of your way to do something that's completely unnecessary. They are concubines of MS, period.