Here's a very fresh update on the matter from the fantastic Mr. Matthew Garrett: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/25091.html
Here's the summary of it: "Hence this patch. The new approach is to ask the firmware how much space is available. If the size of the new variable would reduce this to less than 5K, we attempt to create a variable bigger than the remaining space. This should cause the firmware to realise that it's out of room and either (depending on implementation) perform a garbage collection run at runtime or set a flag that will cause the system to perform garbage collection on the next reboot. We then call QueryVariableInfo() again to see whether a garbage collection run actually happened, and if so check whether we now have enough space. If so, we go ahead and write the variable. If not, we tell userspace that there's not enough space. This seems to work in all the situations I've tested, and it should avoid ending up in a situation where a Samsung can end up bricked. However, it's firmware, so who knows whether it's going to break things for someone else." The aforementioned patch can be found here: https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/6/1/200 So my question, or rather begging, would be may somebody from the Ubuntu kernel team backport this patch so that it would be available on (at the very least) daily images of 13.04 (or older folks who prefer it)? So that people would be as safe from being affected by the bug as much as possible? -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1040557 Title: UEFI boot live-usb bricks SAMSUNG 530U3C,np700z5c laptop To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-cdimage/+bug/1040557/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
