LG CD-ROMs Destroyed by Mandrake 9.2

An anonymous reader writes "The latest offering of Mandrake's distribution, 9.2, has been found to not only be incompatible with some LG CD-ROM drives, but to destroy them during the installation process. Mandrake have posted information on their errata page and further information can be found on this thread [google]. Along with over 350Mb of updates within a week of release, it's not been a good start for this latest release."

Is this Mandrake-specific?

[Beg4Mercy]

Is it Mandrake specifically or any GNU/Linux distribution that damages these drives?

If you're a hardware manufacturer...

[defile]

...and software is capable of destroying your products, you're fucking fired.

To LG

[Unominous Coward]

Do you think there might be a problem with your hardware if it can be destroyed solely with software?

Re:Well...

[sketerpot]

Yes, if the drive as actually destroyed then it's the drive maker's fault. No data should be able to harm a CD-ROM drive. I think that LG should be getting busy soon with making sure this doesn't happen in the future.

As for Mandrake, I'm sure that the updates are a good thing, unless they're stupid bugs that should have been fixed before release.

Re:Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes how silly of LG not to test with a version of an operating system which hadn't been released when they made the drives.

How exactly can this me LG's fault if mandrake is the ONLY distro that does this and it ONLY started doing it with this version.

Funny

[friday2k]

If Windows would do this to your drive there would be a public outcry. Here on /. it is more like "ah well, shit happens, it's mentioned in the errata so suck it up and get over it".

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:To LG

[n3rd]

Do you think there might be a problem with your hardware if it can be destroyed solely with software?

Probably not.

I can tell my monitor to use a refresh rate that will physically damage it. I can tell my hard drive to move it's heads off the platter to find cylinders that don't exist. I can overclock various parts of my computer until they start smoking.

Although there may be a problem with the hardware, software certainly can be used to destry many types of hardware.

Re:Linux bias

[addaon]

Dude, software should never be able to damage hardware. Not in 2003. Part of this is just common sense -- how could anyone design hardware that bad? But beyond that, it is only a matter of time before someone writes a virus that includes this cute little effect. It is no longer possible to blow up a CRT by giving it an out-of-range signal, or to call halt-and-catch-fire, or to blow up your car's engine by overreving it (assume you haven't screwed with the rev limiter). It is not okay for normal usage to damage hardware, and in the computer world 'normal usage' means any data at all, even malicious or (in the case of Mandrake, it seems) really bad data.

Re:To LG

[Liselle]

If I try to tell my monitor to use a refresh rate that will damage it, it will tell me to screw off. My P4 will start to slow down, automatically, if it starts getting too hot, in order to keep it from burning out. Hardware suicide is more or less a thing of the past for a large portion of things.

I would consider it poor design on the part of the hardware manufacturer is something silly could burn it out. Are you telling me the next SoBig virus is going to make everyone's monitors explode?

Re:the culprit

[Horia]

Imagine if someone incorporated in the next big MS Windows virus an exploit for this vulnerability and destroyed thousands of LG CDROMS - what would LG have to say, I wonder.

Just wondering...

[rhombic]

I wonder how many folks here would be bitching out LG if it was XP that was trashing the hardware?

Re:Well...

[AstroDrabb]

I just read a post from Alan Cox, it appears that if you send a flush cache command to the specific LG drives or their compaq rebadged ones, the drive gets fried. So this really has nothing to do with Mandrake and everything to do with a poorly designed drive.

Virus attack

[Peachy]

How long before this code is lifted and put into a virus?

Re:Just wondering...

[gmack]

Just as many. The OS should not be able to fry harware with a simple access even if it's XP.
Were not talking crashes were talking hardware fails.

Re:MOD THIS UP!!! I'M FEELING INSIGHTFUL.

[shweazel]

Software != Firmware.

The mandrake problem doesn't have anything to do with firmware as far as I can tell, you just send a flush command to the drive, and it fails.

A simple software command should never, EVER be able to fry hardware. Screwing with the firmware is another problem entirely.

Re:Funny

[Compenguin]

The Apple case was caused by the CD manufacturer's violating standards, here AFAIK mandrake isn't violating standards

Re:MOD THIS UP!!! I'M FEELING INSIGHTFUL.

[jtdubs]

Then put a separate copy of the original firmware into read-only memory at manufacturing time and provide a physical button that writes the known good firmware over the current firmware...

Are you some kind of moron?

[pr0ntab]

Of course not. We'd still be bashing LG.

Because lots of us run Windows, and we know just as well as anyone else that they use ATAPI just like the rest of the fucking world to talk to the drive.

So, if the drive dies when you run GearPro with packet-write support, or the UDF CDR feature of explorer, but no other drive dies when you use it, then would you blame GearPro, Microsoft, or LG?

Sure, there'd be some jokes made, yadayada, but no moreso than usual-> no one would seriously blame MS (and stay modded up). Slashdotters want to know the real cause of their technological troubles, no matter who's involved.

Re:Potential fallout?

[ScrewMaster]

Well, what I think will happen is that there will be more effort put into eliminating our choice as to what software we run on our PCs and what we use them for. After all, that's really what Palladium and "trusted computing" is all about. More FUD is on its way about how these "rogue" Linux systems can't be trusted not to burn up your equipment, etc. etc.

This will only fuel their "See, you lost a CD-ROM drive and because it's open-source, there's no one to cry to" argument.

Of course, practically speaking there is never anyone to cry to when hardware fails other than the hardware manufacturer, or your local retailer. This problem could easily have shown up in a Microsoft product first, since it is using a documented feature of the drive! There are reasonable limits you can expect software vendors to go to in testing hardware, given the vast number of products on the market. In any event, even if Windows did toast my drive (and I've had a couple mysteriously croak under Windows although I never suspected it was a firmware issue) I can't see Microsoft sending me a new drive, or for that matter ever admitting it was their fault! All the pro-Microsoft apologist trolls here on Slashdot can grumble all they want, but at least here the accountability trail is very complete (a definite plus for open source) and we'll be able to verify when and how the problem is fixed. Try doing that with Windows.

Re:whoopsie??

[Simple-Simmian]

Yes you are right software should not break hardware. So WTF is wrong with LG eh?

Re:Potential fallout?

[Jennifer E. Elaan]

I think it's much more likely that they could sue LG. Mandrake was merely distributing an enhancement for their CDROM support that would work on virtually any CDROM drive outside of this range. This would classify that use as "normal use".

A product that dies during normal use is a problem for the manufacturer. LG should just recall them before this becomes a fiasco.

Re:Well...

[mentin]

No data should be able to harm a CD-ROM drive.

That is stupidiest BS I've seen. OS can e.g. override firmware of the disk drive. If it writes bogus firmware, the disk will be permanently damaged. Just like OS can screw your BIOS and computer would not boot anymore. Current hardware is highly configurable by software, and if software damages hardware, it's software fault.

I think that LG should be getting busy soon with making sure this doesn't happen in the future.

I think Mandrake should be busy about it.

Re:Funny

[mickwd]

Look on it as a lesson in life.

Treat other people with respect, be part of a "community", and they'll forgive you the odd unfortunate mistake.

Spend your life screwing over other people, think about nothing else except "number one" or "the bottom line" and, rightly or wrongly, any unfortunate mistake you made gets jumped on.

Come, take my Insightfulnes now

[odiado]

Me as a tech support of a cheapo cdrom buyers comunity (lg, creative, btc, benq, lite-on, even actima) have found that linux distros (red hat, mandrake, suse) always treats cdroms as shit . I mean having them spin at top revolutions all the time and such things. I have learned lessons installing linux distros from CDROM, enough to prefer to install from any other source at all costs, instead of shorten dramatically my cdrom lifecycle.

What I don't understand is why windows generally knows better how to deal nicely with cdroms even with the new ones. As far as I know there aren't drivers specific to a model or brand embedded in windows and you don't install any normally. Obviously CDROMs are mainly designed for windows, but doesn't linux developers use this guidelines?

Anyway for me this is a kind of selection. Shall the bad hardware die in the hands of the transparent ever growing monster.

How much until we have "open" hardware?

SuSE is american?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought it was German. I know yanks have a habit of claiming they invented stuff (usually 19 years after it was invented by a non-american) but this is too much.

Re:Well...

[Dahan]

Why is Linux trying to send a flush cache command to a CD-ROM drive in the first place? That's a stupid thing to do. The ATAPI FLUSH CACHE command tells the device to flush its write cache to the media. A CD-ROM has no write cache, and can't write to any media. Of course, it's even more stupid for a drive to self-destruct when it gets a flush cache command...

Mandrake were *not* lazy

[leonbrooks]

Rather, it apears to be lazy programmers at Mandrake.

Mandrake actually tested on several broken models of LG drive, including one I own. It didn't kill any of them. Why not? Well, it turns out that none of the drives tested had the broken firmware revision(s).

Using your reasoning, Mandrake should have tested every single firmware release of every single model of every single piece of hardware that their OS interacts with - in all possible combinations - with every single subrelease of their own kernel. Got a spare aeon or two?

Re:It happened to Apple

[MO!]

The difference between this and the Apple problem is with standards. Apple's drives work correctly when using media that conforms to the appropriate standards. The copy-protected disks in that instance were explicitely breaking the standards, so it was the media that was at fault. That's why Philips stated that that type of media was a shiny plastic disk or something - but it was not a CD(tm).

With his problem, if the Mandrake installer is conforming to standards when accessing the drive, and the drive fails because it doen't meet those standards, then it's the drive at fault. If however, the Mandrake installer is pushing something too far and stepping outside the boundries the standard specifies, then Mandrake would be at fault.

It appears at this point that they (Mandrake) are still looking into which of the two above it is.

No, it's hardware damaging hardware

[leonbrooks]

A standard ATAPI command with standard parameters etc etc does the damage to certain revisions of firmware on certain models of LG drive. The technical term for this kind of behaviour is "suicide". Take your drive in and warranty it.

R. I. P.
L.G. Drive
Killed by
Firmware
- 2003 -

Re:Well...

[AstroDrabb]

It is not Linux, it is Mandrake who put an *experimental* kernel patch into a *production* release. It was very stupid. The patch was meant for ide cd-rw drives in which case you want to flush. That is why the LG CD-RW drives are not affected, only the normal CD-ROM drives. This is one of the reasons I *never* use Mandrake. I have had too many problems with their distribution. I stick to Red Hat. It is *far* more stable and Red Hat has 6 of the top 10 kernel developers working for them.

Right on the money! Read this from the Cooker list

[leonbrooks]

21mdk just updated (vdanen should be doing the official update) fixes that problem. Only LG plain CD-ROMS are affected.

[...]

PS. Yep, whoeved decided at LG that reusing for UPLOAD_FIRMWARE command FLUSH_CACHE comand should be shoot. Twice.

And I agree. They should. (-: Just a s-l-i-g-h-t incompatibility there :-)

Kernel says FLUSH_CACHE, LG does UPDATE_FIRMWARE

[leonbrooks]

Who would you say is to blame?

Re:The packet writing itself doesn't kill them

[Dahan]

Huh? Where did you get the idea that the FLUSH CACHE was used to determine whether or not the device was a writer or not? Look at pkt_flush_cache() in drivers/block/pktcdvd.c... it's used to flush the cache of pending writes when closing the CD device.

I saw Juan Quintela's message to the list too, but I get the impression that he's just speculating that LG treats FLUSH CACHE as UPLOAD FIRMWARE; it's not like we've got any official word from LG other than "we don't support Linux." All we know is that for the drives in question, FLUSH CACHE renders the drive inoperative. Note that the ATA standard defines a "DOWNLOAD MICROCODE" command for uploading firmware. Juan's message mentions that the -21mdk kernel fixes the problem... looks like the fix was just to remove the packet writing support.

Anyways, don't use FLUSH CACHE to determine whether a device is a writer or not--that's a lame way to do it. Writers these days support the MMC command set (and the old ones that don't aren't gonna do packet writing anyway)--get the Capabilities and Mechanical Status mode page instead; it'll return bits saying whether the drive supports writing to CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, etc...

Re:/., I tried to warn 'ya...

[buchanmilne]

When I get back to work Monday I'll post that info (and the firmware versions, if I can get them) to the Mandrake Club Install forum. Of course, that's where I should have posted it in the first place.

Actually, you might want to try a route that will get you to developers more directly, either by filing a bug in the bug tracking system for stable releases [mandrakelinux.com] or by posting to the cooker list.

It took over a day to get from the Club to developers, as I picked it up a bit late on the Club, and could only post to the maintainers list the next morning.

Anyway, posting to a news site is not the first thing you should do if you're interested in having it fixed quickly (people don't take kindly to getting bad press without you giving them an opportunity to investigate first).