Foxconn ‘sabotages’ BIOS to stop Linux running

Posted at: 4:00pm 25th July 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

ACPI support automatically broken when Linux is detected on G33M-S motherboard, alleges Ubuntu forums poster

Much like the fiasco over Daniel_K’s modded Creative drivers, the Internet community has once again given a voice to the angry people against the big companies. This time the company facing the wrath of Joe Public is Foxconn, which is alleged to have deliberately ‘sabotaged’ the BIOS on some of its motherboards to stop them running Linux.

The accusations stem from a post on the Ubuntu forums, where a poster called The AlmightyCuthulu details his Linux-woes with a Foxconn BIOS. After rooting around in the BIOS on his Foxconn G33M-S motherboard, he says that it contains different tables for different operating systems, and the one for Linux ‘points to a badly written table that does not correspond to the board's ACPI implementation.’ This, he says, results in ‘weird kernel errors, strange system freezing, no suspend or hibernate, and other problems.’

He then goes into more detail, saying that he used a disassemble program to get into the BIOS, and ‘found that it detects Linux specifically and points it to bad DSDT [Differentiated System Description Table] tables, thereby corrupting it's [sic] hardware support.’

ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) is an open standard that was first published in 1999, and was co-developed by Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Microsoft, Phoenix and Toshiba. The idea is that you have industry-standard interfaces so that your operating system can setup your PC’s hardware configuration and power management. So far there have been three main versions (with some other variations in between), and Foxconn claims that its G33M-S motherboard fully supports ACPI.

With ACPI being an industry standard, this means the board should work with any supporting OS. However, TheAlmightyCthulu has posted his correspondence with Foxconn over the issue, in which Foxconn simply says: ‘This board was never certified for Linux. It is only certified for Vista.’ Foxconn also points to the fact that its board’s ACPI-compliance has received Microsoft Certification for WHQL, but then ACPI under Windows isn’t the issue here.

However, simply not supporting an operating system is different from writing a BIOS that deliberately stops it working properly. The poster on the Ubuntu forums says that ‘this violates an anti-trust provision in the Microsoft settlement,’ and also says he believes that ‘Microsoft is giving Foxconn incentives to cripple their motherboards if you try to boot to a non-Windows OS.’