July 25, 2008

Foxconn deliberately sabotaging their BIOS to destroy Linux ACPI? - Foxconn make motherboards, and some of these do not comply with ACPI industry specification, and will not support features such as hibernate and suspend, as well as fan control and thermal zone on a non-Windows operating system. Malice or "we decided we didn't really care about Linux about halfway through the BIOS writing process so we just left whatever we had at the time in there and called it a day," - you be the judge.

'Bad ACPI support on Foxconn G33M/G33M-S motherboards with AMI BIOS'; Malone bug tracking system, 24 July, 2008

  • That Ryan is one angry dude. Can't say I blame him, but when making complaints like this it doesn't help much to get pissy with people when you are asking for help. Not that I haven't fired off some profanity-laden screed to the Mac Office feedback page after one full system freeze too many, but that was anonymous feedback!
  • You think that's something? You should have read the strongly worded email I sent to Adobe once. Oh, the caustic sting of my keyboard!
  • Hmmmm, my fallback stance is never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity (or sheer laziness,) but I dunno enough about it. MonkeyFilter: Not that I haven't fired off some profanity-laden screed..., but that was anonymous feedback!
  • That Ryan is one angry dude. the neckbeard, it scratches.
  • Open Standards is an ongoing battle with real consequences for the future. If the computers we buy are engineered to make the earth move in epicycles and have the sun stand still without Microsoft, then a rant or a million of them, rather, might be a wonderful reverse PR for Microsoft and Foxconn, both. Ryan is right to bluster all he wants, hoping to get mass action. If he were begging for a small thing he might wheedle and flatter to better effect. But if chip manufacturers are complicit in monopolistic tactics, someone must put the fear of God into them. Of course it works better if it's the courts or international law that does it. For example, in March the Microsoft Open XML standard (as used in their suspiciously UNOPEN, unportable DOCX default) was rejected by the IOS -thanks especially to Brazil and India. Microsoft will try again to ham-string us though, because Bill Gates's software, at least, is the opposite of what should be expected from a big humanitarian. Big monopolist maybe, but no humanitarian where it counts for freedom and fairness.
  • Only a week after the bad press about the Linux bugs on Foxconn MoBos (actually the AMI BIOS that several board makers use), Foxconn is the first vendor out with a publicly released test patch that fixes the bulk of the problems, allowing kernel 2.6.26 to run well on the G33M series.