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EFI and Linux: the future is here, and it's awful - Matthew Garrett

Linux.conf.au 2012 -- Ballarat, Australia

11K subscribers • 4 videos on Hallway

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  • Recommended by 2 people: 2 on Hacker News.
  • Presented by Matthew Garrett, Linux kernel developer
  • An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

76K views14 years ago2 recommendations

Systems programmingSecurityOperating systemsLinuxWeb and application security

Matthew Garrett explains the transition from PC BIOS to UEFI, detailing the architectural flaws, implementation bugs, and Secure Boot challenges for Linux.

The PC BIOS is a dreadful thing. Poorly standardised and often poorly implemented, it has one job to do and frequently does it badly. The kernel and bootloaders are obliged to devote extensive sections of code to working around issues present in the BIOS, code and time that could have been better spent elsewhere. Everyone agrees that the PC BIOS is awful.

Why it's here

2 people recommend this

What people say. Highly recommended for its humorous yet deeply technical explanation of UEFI bugs, Secure Boot, and bootloader complexities.

pserwyloon Hacker News • Recommends

On “More in the series of bizarre UEFI bugs”

…the conference. This was great because I missed it the first time. My favourite quote from the talk was: "Files contain code, and code, as we all know, contains bugs. Always. So from this we can conclude that UEFI contains bugs. This shouldn’t surprise anyone, other than the Linux kernel which obviously contains no bugs at all ever." 1. 0 - link to this video (Keep in mind this was in January, when there was still a lot of uncertainty about the UEFI Secure Boot/Linux situation). 1 - link…
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forgottenpasson Hacker News • Recommends

On “Booting to Rust”

EFI even talks FAT and there exists licensing such that you can use FAT for EFI reasons without any patent worries. I'm not saying that's a bad decision, just pointing out it is another thing that happened. I heard that fact in a linux.conf.au talk by the guy what did UEFI work for linux 0. If you're sad to hear about the Microsoft influence, dude isn't too hot on the implementation of this new standard in general. Interesting talk though, digging up the link to post it here means I'm going to give it another watch. 0 EFI and Linux: the future is here, and it's awful - Matthew Garrett link to this video
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keeperofdakeyson Hacker News • Mentions

On “Booting Linux using UEFI can brick Samsung laptops”

Sorry, but the BIOS had many issues, and UEFI provided a solution to them, even if it wasn't an inherently good system. 1.The BIOS isn't portable, you can compile UEFI for any platform by porting a small base module. Everything uses this module, so the compiler will take care of the rest. 2. BIOS was a heap of 16bit assembly code, with a small memory space. It was quite hard to add any kind of complex functionality. 3. You couldn't use a boot volume greater than 2TB due to MBR. A new one wasn't added because of number 2. 4. UEFI is more like a micro kernel then a generic BIOS, and provides the functionality for vendors to write 'better' interfaces. Here the interfaces aren't actually provide…
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dlitzon Hacker News • Mentions

On “A x64 OS #1: UEFI”

Yeah, Matthew Garrett also gave a pretty detailed talk about it Linux.conf.au 2012, which reaches a similar conclusion: link to this video
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sedachvon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Windows 10 will use protected folders to thwart crypto ransomware”

…prevent other operating systems from being installed on as many systems as they can get away with (right now there is no provision that end users should be allowed to disable Secure Boot on ARM devices, for example). The "security" functionality is an unworkable side-effect that provides a convenient fiction to accomplish that goal. 1 link 2 link to this video…
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