Okay, digging it seems this is a common hardware problem that Windows solves by ignoring: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6105 Linux does too since 2.6.34: $ git describe 6b9d363c49d22395d0cf8729c5963f83cfbb6d69 v2.6.34-rc1-31-g6b9d363