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

Re:Linus Torvalds is his own worst enemy

[BasilBrush]

Given that Linux is running on everything from my phone to my sat-nav

Anyone know what OS is on Garmin Nuvi GPSs ? Because it's the only device I have that crashes frequently.

Re:Linus Torvalds is his own worst enemy

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, because being critical of Torvalds means you must be "the enemy."

Re:Ideology is what it's all about

[BitZtream]

To put it bluntly, its because you're an ass and no one wants to deal with you.

Doesn't matter how great of a coder you are, or how meticulous you are about security, if you want free shit, you can't piss in peoples faces on a daily basis.

OpenBSD isn't THAT special, and if it didn't create OpenSSH, someone else would have. You are not unique. You are easily replaceable with someone better, we just have them doing more important things right now.

Go crawl back into your hole and work on how you're going to change your 'No exploits since ...' line the next time you get exploited so you can still pretend its been a long time.

Your work may be well known, but it isn't why people know you, and THAT is why you are in the situation you are in. If you were half as smart as you think you are, you'd realize what you've done to yourself.

Re:Linus Torvalds is his own worst enemy

[BitZtream]

Unlike Linux fanboys who are too stupid to realize it ... BSD people just go into the EFI setup and turn off secure boot or add their own keys and move on because this isn't anything more than a theoretical problem.

Linux fanboys just rant and rave about freedom and oppression. BSD fanboys just keep getting shit done.

If you read the UEFI spec, specifically the Microsoft requirements for certification for Windows8 and how that relates to secure boot, you'd know the answer to the problem is ... ADD YOUR OWN KEYS INSTEAD OF MICROSOFTS OR TURN OFF SECURE BOOT. Both of these things are requirements of Windows 8 certification on x86/x64 at this time.

So basically, Linux fanboys are just too stupid to go turn off feature they are so afraid of.

Next year, MS may change the requirements and that might be a problem. BSD people will worry about it then. Linux fanboys will speculate about it and spread FUD until people realize its FUD and get tired of hearing about it and then once again, things will go back to normal.