Lenovo created a stir when it said the Yoga 900 and 900S hybrids would work only with Windows, not Linux. The company has now changed its stance, bringing Linux support to those PCs.
The PC maker earlier this month issued a BIOS update so Linux can be loaded on Yoga 900, 900S and IdeaPad 710 models.
The BIOS update adds an AHCI (Advance Host Controller Interface) SATA controller mode so users can load Linux on the laptops.
This is a Linux-only BIOS, meaning it should be used only by those who want to load the OS. If you want to continue with Windows, do not load the firmware. “This BIOS is not intended to be used on machines running Windows operating systems,” Lenovo said.
Still not an ideal solution, but at least they’re listening.
I’m guessing/hoping that this update just undoes Lenovo’s 2 byte patch responsible for hard coding the AHCI bios option. I doubt they would go further and make new changes just to break windows.
The message probably got lost in translation: “unnecessary for windows” -> “only use if running linux”.
That’d be my guess. Windows is a pain in the ass, but it does have ahci support. Of course, this is the company that preloaded a lot of machines with malware at no extra charge, so I’d not put it past them to deliberately screw this up either.
More likely, they simply don’t want to spend time verifying that the change doesn’t break anything on Windows. Testing and certification is expensive – easier to just declare it Linux-only, and discourage Windows users from installing it.
“Poor” Lenovo. It’s not like they’re selling ultra cheap toys, but this does tend to be the main “reaction” in most hardware/software companies when it comes to testing.
Oh great article, not:
Locking specific hardware to Windows has emerged as an issue in recent years. For example, Intel’s Kaby Lake chips support only Windows 10, so will AMD’s upcoming Zen chips.
and a bit lower contradicting it
Another option is to buy Linux-based laptops with the latest Kaby Lake chips, like System76’s Lemur laptop, which starts at $699, or Dell’s XPS 13 Developer Edition, which starts at $949.
Yeah, it seems to confuse several subjects. Possibly the first paragraph is talking about older Windows versions not supporting newer hardware platforms (Kaby Lake), and conflating that with the fact that *some* systems based on those platforms are locked to Windows.
Speculating of firmware additional MS code [the incompatibility]…
By their natural to be general purpose machines you can not make a CPU that will run only one OS.
What you can do is set up a CPU that is needs certain byte codes or flags to be set to let an OS get access to the feature of that CPU. Once the secret is known it can be added to just about any OS that is compiled for that CPU.
The best one can probably design and patent special (higher speed) way to handle some critical hardware so that no-one else can access that hardware without violating the patent. And if the hardware is something is the mouse, keyboard, screen one would be in a mess or have a lot of USB devices to get around it. But if it is something like the main memory, high speed internal buss, etc you are locked out.
Hi,
Correct.
The “problem” has been grossly misreported and exaggerated by people that have no idea what they’re talking about.
The real problems are:
a) AHCI doesn’t have good power management (and the AHCI spec needs to be updated/extended/improved)
b) Because of the first problem, Lenovo used “RAID controller” to get better power management
c) “RAID controller” has no usable standard (unlike AHCI), and each different RAID controller needs a different driver.
d) Linux doesn’t have a driver for it.
e) Instead of blaming anything that actually matters (Linux for not having a driver, hardware manufacturers for never standardising RAID controllers, standardisation committee responsible for AHCI for not providing adequate power management); everyone decided to blame Lenovo(!).
Note that none of these problems have been solved. By switching back to AHCI, the power management (battery life) for Linux will be worse than it is for Windows; and all other laptop manufacturers will probably do the same thing; so Linux will end up inferior to Windows on all laptops/notebooks.
– Brendan
Linux HAVE those drivers since 2.6.18. Is just a matter of have the mdadm raid module loaded.
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/boards-and-kits/0000…
Problem is, that the first guy that blamed Lenovo, forgot to do a research before making a storm in a teacup. Guy loaded Ubuntu, didn’t have the tech skills to install mdadm, scan for devices, manual partition and THEN, install the Distro.
Mdadm is software raid. We’re talking about hardware raid. Completely different animal.
Now, what was that about lack of tech skills?
MDADM does support this kind of softraid(Intel RST technology).Cant you just Google arround insted being a a**hole?
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/53ri0m/warning_microsoft_sig…
Page 4
http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/white-p…
you’re welcome…
I was going to say… it is NOT hardware RAID, there are three types… Software RAID, Hardware RAID, and Fake RAID. All of Intel’s that I have ever seen end up in the last category. They generally show up in Lunux as separate devices, hence you end up being better off using Software RAID.
leech,
Edited 2016-11-10 22:07 UTC
> Software raid poses a chicken and egg problem whereby the software raid driver isn’t available to load the OS.
That’s why you can only install GRUB on mdadm RAID1. I have a server with four drives RAIDed together. The first partition of each drive is a four-disk RAID1 for /boot, and then the other two are mdadm RAID10 for swap and /.
Unfortunately, inferior power management and battery life on Linux has been par for the course for the past decade.
In my experience, firefox is responsible for most of that. I regularly firefox spinning a CPU doing very little actually useful, I think within the event loop within glib (I’ve also noticed other applications with the same problem.)
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=508427
Except… I didn’t mention Firefox anywhere. Because, on Linux, I don’t use it.
Linux has quite good power management actually. The problem is that it is often buggy in hardware and distributions don’t enable it by default because then it would crash mysteriously for some people. Or USB devices like your mouse would stop working.
What Linux needs is a giant hardware database with all the details of what works where so it knows that BIOS 37 on a Dell Unicorn can’t enable ASPM.
No, what Linux needs is a stable development interface and driver ABI so things can be written for it by those who know them best–the manufacturers–and be guaranteed to work.
Look, it doesn’t matter if the bug is in hardware or not. If it’s going to crash mysteriously, it’s not good power management. Period. This is why desktop Linux never got anywhere: the attitude of those who run it. The “works for me and it’ll work for you except this and that and the other and also this if…” attitude.
Oh yeah, so they can write crap drivers like the laptop wifi I had in 2007 where the Windows driver crashed the machine if you installed more than 1 GB RAM. Because you know DMA to addresses that big just can’t happen.
Or the hundreds of Windows drivers that patch their ACPI bugs in the driver instead of the firmware because getting their users to run a BIOS flash is too difficult. And no one cares about anything but Windows, right?
Maybe if the manufacturers would just follow the standards and try a COMPLIANCE TEST once in a while…
Thanks to Lenovo. It’s a House I recommend and Linux always welcomed as a way to extend life of old hardware and distress our Biosphere.
Don’t Believe that Microsoft could be Happy of supporting old hardware -They have expressed against it in many ways-. Also, this is good PR in the form of keeping their ecosystem OPEN to other OS. Chatting just about consumer devices.