Linus Torvalds Explodes at Red Hat Developer

sfcrazy writes "Quite a lot of people raised their eyebrows the way ex-Red Hat developer Matthew Garrett made Microsoft the 'universal' control of any desktops PCs running with UEFI secure boot. Though the intentions of Garrett were clear — to enable GNU/Linux to be able to run Linux on Windows 8 certified PCs with secure boot; it was clearly putting Microsoft in a very powerful position. Linus, while a supporter of secure boot, exploded at Garrett and Howells when they proposed its inclusion in the kernel. Linus responded: 'Guys, this is not a d*#@-sucking contest. If you want to parse PE binaries, go right ahead. If Red Hat wants to deep-throat Microsoft, that's *your* issue. That has nothing what-so-ever to do with the kernel I maintain. It's trivial for you guys to have a signing machine that parses the PE binary, verifies the signatures, and signs the resulting keys with your own key. You already wrote the code, for chissake, it's in that f*cking pull request.'" Update: 02/25 17:24 GMT by U L : The headline/article are misleading, since mjg seems to agree that the patch is a bit complicated : "(I mean, *I'm* fine with the idea that they're *@#$ing idiots and deserve to be miserable, but apparently there's people who think this is a vital part of a business model)". The issue at hand is a set of patches to load and store keys inside of a UEFI PE binary which is then passed to the kernel, which then extracts the keys from the binary. It's absurd, it's messy, and it's only needed because Microsoft will only sign PE binaries so not supporting it makes restricted boot even more difficult to support.

Comments

With performances like this ...

[Rambo Tribble]

... Fox News is going to want him.

Re:Can any one help...

[Anonymous Coward]

It appears that the Ex-Red Hat dev wants to include support for Secure Boot (as ultimately controlled by Microsoft) in the Linux Kernel itself, while Linus does want to do this on ideological grounds because that would acknowledge that Microsoft has control. Linus is being a bit of a Palestinian about it.

Re:Ideology is what it's all about

[BasilBrush]

And as long as it's about an ideology, rather than being a good user experience, Linux will continue to fail on the desktop.

The only reason it's found success in other markets (phones, servers, embedded systems) is because of the meaning of free that's not ideology - free as in beer.

Pretty Sure It's a Dick Sucking Contest

[Greyfox]

Canonical and Red Hat might be having a dick sucking contest. Maybe they just didn't invite Linus.