On Thursday morning, Linus Torvalds merged two changes into the main Linux development tree which mean that the samsung-laptop kernel driver will no longer be activated when Linux is booted via UEFI (1, 2). This should resolve the problem of some Samsung laptops being irreparably damaged when Linux is booted using UEFI. The does not, however, mean that the danger is past, as there appear to be other ways in which the sensitive firmware can be disrupted.

Some other systems are still having trouble. In particular, some UEFI Secure Boot-equipped Toshiba laptops won't boot Linux at all. According to Garrett,"This turns out to be some staggering incompetence on the part of Toshiba (or, more likely, their third-party vendor) - they managed to leave the signing key out of the database that's used to validate binaries, and managed to leave the signature database signing key out of the database that's used to provide whitelist or blacklist updates. The good news is that this is a blatant violation of Microsoft's Windows 8 certification guidelines, and that seems to have encouraged Toshiba to actually fix their BIOS. The bad news is that any of the affected machines that are currently available are still broken, and Toshiba don't seem to be willing to actually give you the firmware update yet."

Finally, and more troubling, some Lenovo PCs with UEFI Secure Boot aren't simply checking the proper keys to see if an operating system should be allowed to boot, but are also checking to see if an operating system is saying if it's"Windows" in its descriptive text. If the text doesn't say Windows, even if it is Windows 8, it won't boot. As Garrett says,"This is, obviously, bizarre." This problem has been known since November, and, Garrett's sole recommendation is"drinking, because as far as I know they haven't actually got around to doing anything useful about this yet."