Select Samsung Notebooks Can Be Bricked When Booting Linux Via UEFI

Linux users have long had the right to be concerned about UEFI's "SecureBoot" feature, and this is a perfect justification for it. It seems that on select Samsung notebook models, merely booting into Linux via UEFI can brick it. We're not just talking about something that an OS re-install could fix, either - it literally seems to corrupt the UEFI, requiring the entire mainboard to be replaced.

Wow.

What makes this problem even more striking is that it's not new. One Ubuntu user last year bricked their Samsung 530U3C when trying to install the OS. Since then, more models have crept up as being problematic.

While it'd be easy to pin Samsung as an enemy here, this certainly wasn't something the company did on purpose. It was just as baffled by the problem as everyone else, but singled out the culprit as being the Samsung laptop driver available in the Linux kernel itself. Some fixes have been released thanks to Intel's Matt Fleming, but none of them have made their way into the official kernel up to this point.

If you happen to own a Samsung UEFI notebook and had plans to install Linux, we'd recommend that you don't until definitive fixes are in play. The last thing anyone needs is to deal with an RMA for their notebook over such a simple, but major, issue.