Matthew Garret of CoreOS on Twitter (@mjg59)
Lenovo aren't deliberately blocking free software on recent laptops (spoiler: it's Intel's fault)
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OH MY GOD the person who started the Lenovo shitstorm is Ryan Farmer https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Microsoft-Signature-PC-No-Linux …, who spammed me after I debunked him in 2008
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Summary: This guy has a history of making over the top accusations, and responds badly when called on it. Don't enable him.
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And on his blog:
The background is straightforward. Intel platforms allow the storage to be configured in two different ways - "standard" (normal AHCI on SATA systems, normal NVMe on NVMe systems) or "RAID". "RAID" mode is typically just changing the PCI IDs so that the normal drivers won't bind, ensuring that drivers that support the software RAID mode are used. Intel have not submitted any patches to Linux to support the "RAID" mode.
In this specific case, Lenovo's firmware defaults to "RAID" mode and doesn't allow you to change that. Since Linux has no support for the hardware when configured this way, you can't install Linux (distribution installers will boot, but won't find any storage device to install the OS to).
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The real problem here is that Intel do very little to ensure that free operating systems work well on their consumer hardware - we still have no information from Intel on how to configure systems to ensure good power management, we have no support for storage devices in "RAID" mode and we have no indication that this is going to get better in future. If Intel had provided that support, this issue would never have occurred. Rather than be angry at Lenovo, let's put pressure on Intel to provide support for their hardware.