Somewhat late to this I know, but:
On Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 11:48:26AM +0000, Matt Fleming wrote:[ 441.370854] BUG: unable to handle kernel paging request at 00000000ffe1fbc8
So it's attempting a direct access to 00000000ffe1fbc8, which, if I had
to guess, is probably where the flash is located. That makes sense from
the perspective of it being used in efivars. The obvious sadness here is
that it's doing this with a physical address rather than a virtual one.
It's possible that the machine is too broken to live - does Windows
succeed in performing a UEFI install? If it does then I think we need to
just accept that life is ugly and map the UEFI runtime areas with a 1:1
mapping as well as into virtual address space. That would also fix the
problem we see right now where the reboot call often uses a physical
address rather than a virtual one.
Just to let you know I apparently have exactly the same issue with the same
laptop. If it can help, I could try installing the M$ Student Edition during
the weekend and report the results.
Windows Server 2008 64-bit, fresh GPT partition table will be my lab
environment. Standard installation procedure.
I am running Ubuntu 12.04 with 3.2.0-18-generic.
Motiejus