Matthew Garrett ([personal profile] mjg59) wrote,
@ 2011-11-03 01:47 pm UTC
Entry tags:advogato, fedora
This story has been floating around for a week or so. The summary is that someone bought a system that has UEFI and is having trouble installing Linux on it. In itself, not a problem. But various people have either conflated this with the secure boot issue or suggested that UEFI is a fundamentally anti-Linux technology.

Right now there are no machines shipping to the public with secure boot enabled. None at all. If you're having problems installing Linux on a machine with UEFI then it's not because of secure boot. So what is actually causing the problem?

UEFI is a complicated specification, with 2.3.1A being 2214 pages long. It's a large body of code. There's a lot of subtleties. It's very easy for people to get things wrong. For example, we've seen issues where calling SetVirtualAddressMap() resulted in the firmware referencing boot services code, a clear violation of the spec on the firmware authors' part. We've also found machines that failed to boot because grub wasn't aligning its stack properly, a clear violation of the spec on our part.

Software is difficult. People make mistakes. When something mysteriously fails to work the immediate assumption should be that you've found a bug, not a conspiracy. Over time we'll find those bugs and fix them, but until then just treat UEFI boot failures like any other bug - annoying, but not malicious.

(Read 13 comments) - (Post a new comment)
(Flat) (Top-level comments only)

ext_960644: (pic#978434)

Stale story


[identity profile] bkerensa [launchpad.net]
2011-11-03 07:35 pm UTC (link)
Hi Matthew,

The blog post was never intended to become anything close to viral but instead was just a share on the topic. The person who shared the problem suggest I share it so that he could get helped and luckily that is so far what is resulting since he has connected with the right people through our Ubuntu Oregon LoCo mailing list.

There is no doubt that this was likely a bug although even still from the continued conversation occurring on the mailing list it seems very trivial as to whether it is a Ubuntu bug or something wrong with the UEFI firmware.

(Reply to this)  (Thread) 


Re: Stale story


(Anonymous)
2011-11-03 09:08 pm UTC (link)
"The blog post was never intended to become anything close to viral but instead was just a share on the topic. "

Ohhhkaaayyy...then why were you bragging about just that the day after you made that post?

http://imgur.com/RnB1t

(screenshot of: https://plus.google.com/u/0/115750270177636397262#115750270177636397262/posts )

Yeah, but no, but yeah, but....?
Just stay down, buddy. Just stay down.
You're embarrassing yourself and the LoCo you lead.

(Reply to this)  (Thread from start)  (Parent)  (Thread) 


ext_960644: (pic#978434)

Re: Stale story


[identity profile] bkerensa [launchpad.net]
2011-11-03 09:14 pm UTC (link)
I was not bragging about that link bringing traffic but instead traffic in general... In fact the Hacker News traffic was from my post on Occupy Wall Street and a good portion of the other traffic was likely revolving traffic for Netflix on Linux searches.

(Reply to this)  (Thread from start)  (Parent)  (Thread) 


Re: Stale story


(Anonymous)
2011-11-03 09:46 pm UTC (link)
There's a few days discrepancy between posts (UEFI post made on the 23rd and previous one made on the 20th) you're not accounting for and it clearly shows that the traffic stats were for the morning of the 24th. We could do this all day, but this is Matthews blog and I will now stop cluttering it. Before I go though, this is relevant:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kA3WxjplKzo

(Reply to this)  (Thread from start)  (Parent) 


(Read 13 comments) - (Post a new comment)
(Flat) (Top-level comments only)