Meanwhile MSI published a new BIOS version on their homepage for the MSI Wind U110: Version 1.0E
Sadly its still a no go for linux users. It still has the problem the netbook cannot suspend anymore after the update. The only good working BIOS Version is still only 1.09 (which i can give you on request).
Well, most BIOSes are not perfect, but i wish i never started the vicious circle of updating it. But i’ll return to the beginning:
009: My Wind U110 was delivered with this version and all that was wrong was that i noticec that BIOS reported false possible CPU C-States when on battery power (just C2 instead of C6 that cpu supports). But rebooting without AC adapter “solved” it.
10D: This version i downloaded as update from MSIs homepage and after some struggles to update it (finally FirmwareUpdateKit made it real easy … fuk –image /dev/sdb /tmp/biosfiles/*) i had it on my machine… and guess what… it was really disappointing. Eventhough msi fixed the C-State problem, the netbook now refused to suspend!!! 
Eventhough all /sys/devices/*/power/wakeup were disabled it now wakes up immediatelly or hangs hard. Before (with version 009) it suspended fine (with just “s2ram -f”) and even had wlan (via rt2860sta module) working still fine afterwards. But now it was impossible to suspend anymore… which makes daily use of netbook really horrible imho.
So i contacted msi and after the first bothering tips if i really updated correctly they provided me the older BIOS version
10C: But this one behaved exactly like 10D in regard to suspend. So after some more mails with msi they sent me the “very” old 009 plus the version 109 and that one is interesting.
109: Here suspend works again and also C-States are reported correctly.. so all could be fine… BUT it wasn’t in all detail: Now WLAN/rt2860sta doesn’t work anymore after suspend and resume. And simply un- and reloading the module sadfully also didn’t help. There were just countless lines like this in the kernel log:
ERROR!!! BBP(viaMCU=1) read R0 fail
After some search in the net i found that this again seems to be BIOS bug happening when the wlan-module is powered off. But there is a ugly workaround for this problem on my machine.
1. make sure pciehp module is loaded with options pciehp_force=1 (which again points to a buggy bios) and also pciehp_poll_mode=1 (without this second parameter the system didn’t seem to be stable after suspend for me)
2. configure pm-utils to stop network on suspend and restart it on resume (otherwise the module cannot be unloaded) and also to unload and reload the module rt2860sta. I further changed the /etc/init.d/network script to also kill wpa_supplicant on stop action so really nobody anymore accesses the device.
If you need help for those steps feel free to contact me.
Yes, I now got one of those nice new netbooks with a Z-Series Atom CPU (2 GB Ram, 160 GB HDD, Draft N Wlan (needs rt2860sta)). Eventhough the machine is really great the linux support for the Intel graphicscard – Intel Poulsbo/GMA500/PSB – really is a mess (to stay polite). Framebuffer only supports 800×600 which gives you a blury display (with native resolution of 1024×600) and usual intel x driver does not work here. Well, there is a partly opensource driver (which needs several binary blobs), but its nearly unsupported and far far from really usable. But Alexander Graf did a great job packaging it for openSUSE 11.1 (here). Eventhoug this driver originally was made for Ubuntu (they delivere it for Dell Mini 12 with same gfxcard) i never got it working there.
Nearly everything else works great. LAN support is a bit funny. The ethernetcard sits on the usb bus and only activates itself as soon as a cable got plugged in. Then a usb asix device pops up and works great (with the asix module).
Sound needed “options snd_hda_intel model=5stack-digout” in /etc/modprobe.d/sound to work under 11.1.
WLAN is a Ralink RT2860 which works with the module rt2860sta. For 11.1 there are kmps in the buildservice, but they never worked for me. I compiled the sources from the ralink homepage and noticed that the driver works well until udev renames the device from (originally) ra0 to wlan0. Afterwards it does not respond anymore.
The fix that worked best for me was to compile the rt2860sta version from kernel 2.6.30 (in staging tree) for openSUSE 11.1. To make it easier to use this i put it here (yes, i’m too lazy to build a kmp 
.
P.S.: Actually to make wlan work with the packages from above repository from alex you have to blacklist rt2800pci.
P.P.S.: I also recommend to update this machine to the latest BIOS version available from MSI (currently Version 1.0D). As only with this i get fully low-power C-States correctly. To install it i used the package UpdateFirmwareKit and a normal USB-Stick.
P.P.P.S: No, you better don’t update your BIOS to Version 1.0D. It seems this version totally breaks suspend on this machine. I couldn’t find a s2ram parameter combination still working (before just -f worked). Not even with current 2.6.30 it works. I contacted MSI about this and hope they provide a solution for this problem. … Meanwhile as a first response they sent me BIOS Version 1.0C, but that also has the suspend problem. Hopefully they either fixup their BIOS or provide me the working 0.9 Version.