If you read the original reddit thread, you would understand that this is not just a drivers issue. Lenovo intentionally programmed their BIOS so that it reverts any changes to RAID mode making it impossible to install Linux.
True - but as the other HN thread (that I can't seem to find anymore ><) pointed out, if Microsoft's requirements were planned as an attack against free software, it would be an unnecessarily complicated and ineffective one: There is nothing stopping anyone from writing Linux drivers for the new RAID mode - and I guess if more models with this setup show up, eventually someone will write one.
On the other hand, Microsoft could have easily gotten a much more "robust" lockdown - by simply demanding mandatory, unchangeable Secure Boot like on the ARM tablets. But they didn't do that.
Can they not modify that BIOS code to not skip those pages?
I'm sure anyone with enough knowledge to decompile a BIOS would have obviously thought of that idea though. I'm guessing the BIOS images are signed or something?
>On the other hand, Microsoft could have easily gotten a much more "robust" lockdown - by simply demanding mandatory, unchangeable Secure Boot like on the ARM tablets. But they didn't do that.
Didn't you hear that Secure Boot is basically broken?
RAID on a machine with a single SSD (and no provision to add another)? It'd make far more sense if the BIOS was setup so the RAID option was always disabled.
Edit: it'd be rather amusing and saddening if this whole controversy was caused merely by someone misunderstanding/misreading a perfectly sensible requirement to disable the RAID mode, and instead disabled the other options. Given the level of communication fluency among some programmers, I would not be surprised if this were the case; and the fact that the machine still boots into Windows because it has drivers might've let this slip past QA...
The choice seems to be between AHCI and sorta-NVMe, with the latter enabled in 'RAID' mode.
Sure, real/standards-conforming NVMe would be better -- and wouldn't require driver shenanigans in either Windows or Linux -- but there should be a performance advantage to 'RAID' mode in this case.
It is much worse because Lenovo programmed the BIOS to lock the system so if you try to toggle it to AHCI mode with an EFI variable from EFIshell, it immediately sets itself back to RAID mode.
