[ubuntu] Updates of resolution od Foxconn bug --- from Foxconn FAE Heart Zhang

[zhang_heart]

Hello every enthusiasts on Linux,

My name is Heart Zhang from Foxconn China, these days I and another Foxconn guy in UK names Carl Brunning contacted Ryan Farmer with each other at all times by email and phone on the big issue happened on our Foxconn MB G33M-S.

Yesterday evening I sent one debug version BIOS about this issue to Ryan, ask him to help us verify again. This morning Ryan replied me his testing result. Almost bugs are fixed by this BIOS.

Here is Ryan's testing result about the development BIOS
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The development BIOS they sent fixes pretty much all the particularly bad behavior of the current release BIOS, in that:

Fans resume to proper speed after resume from suspend.

PC successfully reboots after having suspended.

PC restarts a lot faster.

PC no longer seems to randomly crash.

PC hibernates and wakes up from hibernation properly.

No longer complains about error reinitializing the Serial ATA controller.

For the sake of curiosity, I tried booting a Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) CD, it booted up whereas it crashed before.

Issues remaining:

Aug 1 05:51:15 ryan-desktop kernel: [18.280909] ACPI Warning (tbutils-0217): Incorrect checksum in table [OEMB] - 96, should be 8F [20070126]

With the release version of the BIOS it said "70, should be 69"

Matthew Garrett says Linux doesn't even need OEMB and this is some vendor-proprietary Windows stuff. (Should be OK to ignore)

Intel HD Audio device does not reinitialize from suspend. (Kernel 2.6.26 fixes this, it appears to be a Linux bug in kernels earlier than this, this kernel will be in Fedora 10 and Ubuntu 8.10)

"ACPI: Error Attaching Device Data" still appears in kernel log, four times. (This too seems to be a Linux bug since 2.6.26 fixes that)

Overall, I believe:

The very worst of it was a bad BIOS.

Many of the annoyances were kernel bugs that are fixed in 2.6.26.

All but the checksum error is fixed if you use the new BIOS and kernel 2.6.26, and the checksum error is not a serious issue anyway.
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So it likes that the BIOS works much better with Linux.
And Ryan told me in the email, he tested the BIOS even on Windows Vista/Server 2008, there also seems like no issue.

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I also gave this BIOS a very crude set of tests with an evaluation edition of Windows Vista/Server 2008 and it even appears to work better with a few things there.
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If someone is intereted in this debug BIOS, you also can download from our Foxconn FAE FTP.

http://wft.foxconn.com/wft/Login.aspx
Login: enduser
Pass: 123456

BIOS name: 772F1D43
You can unzip the file, just run flash.bat on DOS mode to flash BIOS.
Attention: after finishing the BIOS flashing, please goto BIOS setup to load optimized default before first time entering Linux.

I hope you guys can get the good result that you really want.
But that is only a debug version BIOS which focus on this issue, later we will release Production BIOS for it ASAP.
Not only on this motherboard, but also on all the other motherboards which got the same issue.
Please make attention to our website for BIOS update,
http://www.foxconnchannel.com/product/Motherboards/

And here I want to say Thank you to all the linux enthusiasts. From this case, Ryan and all of you gave us a lesson. And also as our plan, we will take more time on Linux OS testing.
And I am sure Linux is becoming more popular and great OS.
For me, Carl Brunning and all the Foxconn FAE, technical support guys, we would like to receive any issues regarding to our products (motherboard and VGA card)whatever it is from Windows, Linux or any other operating system.
You can report to this link if you have any issue or comments,
http://www.foxconnchannel.com/support/online.aspx

If possible, you can inform this message to any people as many as you can. Maybe they met the same issue before on our Foxconn motherboard.

Thanks all of your guys' attention! Thank you very much!

--- Heart Zhang from Foxconn China

[Stratis]

Awesome!

Thanks for the update...

[Bwosc]

Wow, that's great to hear. Impressive response to the community.

[armitage1337]

I'm highly impressed by Foxconn's rapid response to a Linux compatibility problem. This kind of attention to Linux from hardware manufacturers is highly unusual, and I applaud Foxconn for their efforts!

[billd42]

Mr Zhang,

Thank you for your prompt and candid response to this issue. This is exactly the kind of response the Linux community could have hoped for. It's obvious that Foxconn is a good company that listens to feedback from their customers.

I hope that other computer hardware manufacturers would choose to emulate your example in the future.

[nanog]

Thanks...I will remember Foxconn's quick response the next time I build systems.

[stevoo]

i think ill invest in you next time i build my newest pc !

[Rocket2DMn]

For the record, here is the bug report that was filed for this issue - https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...ux/+bug/251338

[zooounds]

My only concern is, how should we flash it from Linux?

Edit: Seems there is some kind of boot disk with some DOS-alike OS that do the job.

[howlingmadhowie]

how do you flash the bios if you don't have windows installed?