is Foxconn sabotaging Linux?
July 25, 2008
Motherboard maker Foxconn refuses to support Linux.
TheAlmightyCthulhu on the Ubuntu Forums is thinking that Foxconn may have delibratley decided not to support Linux
On some Foxconn motherboards Linux freezes and shows strange kernel errors.
TheAlmightyCthulhu disassembled the bios and thinks that a faulty DSDT table was what done it.
Foxconn are aware of it and will not correct it as ‘it doesn’t support Linux’ and is only ‘Microsoft certified.’
Here is an extract from the post:
“I disassembled my BIOS to have a look around, and while I won’t post the results here, I’ll tell you what I did find. They have several different tables, a group for Windows XP and Vista, a group for 2000, a group for NT, Me, 95, 98, etc. that just errors out, and one for LINUX. The one for Linux points to a badly written table that does not correspond to the board’s ACPI implementation.’ The worst part is Foxconn’s insistence that the product is ACPI compliant because their tables passed to Windows work, and that Microsoft gave the the magic WHQL certification.”
More Info Here
that is scary that a company would do such a thing…
That’s nonsense they can run linux, the only reason why i think you get errors is because foxconn is a terrible manufacturer with buggy chipset drivers.
Hi Motherboards!
If you had read a bit more of the post, you would have seen that this was a problem everybody was having.
Also this was there first “Microsoft Approved” motherboard.
This has been patched since as there was outcry by the open-source community and Zheng, the CEO, appologised on a forum somewhere and released an official firmware update that fixes it.
The motherboards old BIOS gave Linux wrong ACPI settings (just linux, thats the way the code was written) so thats why everybody expects sabotage, simply editing that code and giving Linux the same settings as Windows XP fixed it!
I myself did not buy one of these motherboards as they are made in taiwanese sweatshops (its true I can show you a link if you like)