Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 51806
/usr/sbin/sensors-detect corrupts firmware
Last modified: 2015-03-04 20:09:33 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.2) Gecko/20010706 Description of problem: after running /usr/sbin/sensors-detect on an IBM Thinkpad 570, the firmware is corrupted. Machine cannot boot, but hangs with: 0188: Invalid RFID Serialization Area Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. run /usr/sbin/sensors-detect 2. i2c-piix4 and eeprom modules are loaded by the sensors-detect script 3. reboot... firmware is dead! Actual Results: cannot boot system, seems like a motherboard replacement is the only solution! Additional info:
This is a know problem on IBM Thinkpads. IBM knows about this problem. The problem is that we can't really do anything about it except offer a warning not to run this package on IBM Thinkpads as there is no way i know of to determine if lm_sonsors is being run an a Thinkpad. The http://www.linux-thinkpad.org/ website also warns about this problem. I know this doesn't really help you a lot, but i'd suggest you should complain to IBM for not fixing this really hardware or BIOS related problem. At least your IBM dealer should replace the board as mentioned on the above website. Sorry for the inconvenience. Read ya, Phil
Please note that with Red Hat 7.3 I experienced a similar problem on my Thinkpad X21. (I got an 0189 Invalid RFID error in the BIOS, FWIW.) However, I don't recall ever having selected the lm_sensors package, and I certainly didn't manually run any command related to the package. Does Red Hat 7.3 automatically enable / try this if the package is installed? I'd take a look myself, but my laptop is on its way back to IBM right now...