[i]"…This issue appears to stem from the Intel SPI driver in the 17.10’s Linux 4.13 kernel corrupting the BIOS for a select number of laptop motherboards. Canonical is aware of this issue and is planning to disable the Intel SPI drivers in their kernel builds. Canonical’s hardware enablement team has already verified this works around the problem, but doesn’t provide any benefit if your BIOS is already corrupted…
…Should your BIOS be corrupted, you may need to replace your motherboard if there is not a removable flash chip…
…This issue has been confirmed for several different lines of Lenovo laptops including the Yoga and IdeaPad products. There is also the reports of it affecting a few Acer, Toshiba and Dell laptops…"[/i]
20 December 2017
Ubuntu 17.10 Temporarily Pulled Due To A BIOS Corrupting Problem - Phoronix
[url]https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-17.10-BIOS-Corrupter[/url]
Linux Mint 18.3 users may wish to stay with its stock Linux kernel version 4.10.x and refrain from upgrading to kernel ver. 4.13.x (via Synaptic Package Manager) until this has been sorted out.