After looking through the disassembled BIOS for the last several hours, rebooting it, and tweaking it more, I?d say this is very intentional, I?ve found redundant checks to make sure it?s really running on Windows, regardless what the OS tells it it is, and then of course fatal errors that will kernel panic FreeBSD or Linux, scattered all over the place, even in the table path for Windows 9x, NT, 2000, XP, and Vista, and had to correct them (Well, at least divert them off into a segment of RAM I hope to god I?m sure about).
I thought I would give an update on the conclusion of this saga after a "real" programmer with Linux kernel and BIOS expertise
delved into the matter.
It appears that almost every "problem" detailed by Ryan was in fact due to bugs in the Linux kernel, not Foxconn's BIOS. Foxconn's BIOS did have one trivial bug that was not central to any of the serious problems Ryan reported. Garrett
tested the latest Linux release candidate on a Foxconn G33M board running the same "defective" Foxconn BIOS version. Other than the restart issue, no problems were noted or encountered.
The
OS 'sniffing' code in Foxconn's BIOS is in reality
completely incapable of detecting whether it is running any _OSI supporting Linux version released in the past four years, treating it identically to Windows XP, 2003, or Vista.
In response, Ryan dismisses Garrett's contribution as nothing more than a personal attack against him. Ever better, Ryan goes on to suggest that, instead of making poor little Ryan look like an idiot by exposing his understanding of code as barely rank amateur, Garrett's time and energies would be better spent helping Foxconn and AMI write better BIOS code, and getting the bugs fixed in Linux.
Cliffs:
- "Ryan" a.k.a "TheAlmightyCthulhu" accuses Foxconn of deliberately sabotaging Linux, presumably at the behest of Microsoft
- His claims are Digged and Slashdotted to death, even reported or blurbed uncritically by supposedly reputable tech-centric webzines
- Ryan becomes an instant celebrity, an angry mob grows behind him calling for boycotts of Foxconn, complaints to government agencies, investigations of Microsoft
- Foxconn responds as one might expect any company to under such negative publicity, it apologizes and pledges to fix the problems in a forth-coming BIOS
- A "real" coder with Linux kernel and BIOS expertise examines Ryan's analysis of Foxconn's BIOS, then weighs in on the merits
- Ryan is proven to be fantastically wrong on almost every count, dismisses Garrett's expert rebuttal as a personal attack
- Ryan's exposure as a complete idiot and Foxconn's exoneration receives 1/1000th as much publicity or attention