Linked by Radio on Fri 1st Feb 2013 22:57 UTC
The title is pretty much self-explanatory - oh UEFI. "You can read more of what is known at H-Online, but the short summary is this: Samsung's UEFI implementation appears to be faulty. It was most likely tested with Windows only and found to work, but thorough testing with other operating systems doesn't appear to have been a priority - or perhaps a consideration at all. At present, the bug appears to affect Samsung 530U3C, 300E5C, NP700Z5C, NP700Z7C, and NP900X4C series laptops; if you have one of those laptops, we recommend you exercise extreme caution if you have a need to boot into a Linux environment."
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In this case, since Linux is the only os to suffer this, I'd venture to say that the os is defective and not the laptop. "
I'll just chime in that the culprit is actually Samsung's UEFI-implementation. Their implementation doesn't follow the spec properly and handles some corner-cases in an unexpected way. Specifically, it apparently expects a 104-byte structure whereas Linux provides it with a standards-compliant 1024-byte structure and therefore it proceeds to crap all over itself and corrupt NVRAM. The odd thing is that most of the driver-code was provided by Samsung themselves.
Later on it the thread someone said that emptying the NVRAM is enough to fix some (all?) of the affected machines, but it still requires you to open the laptop and removing the NVRAM-battery for 30 seconds or disabling it otherwise if it's soldered-on.