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Systemd Getting UEFI Boot Loader
New submitter mrons writes: Many new features are coming for systemd. This includes the ability to do a full secure boot. As Lennart Poettering mentions in a Google+ comment: "This is really just about providing the tools to implement the full trust chain from the firmware to the host OS, if SecureBoot is available. ... Of course, if you don't have EFI SecureBoot, than nothing changes. Also if you turn it off, than nothing changes either. [sic]" Phoronix notes, "Gummiboot is a simple UEFI boot manager that's been around for a few years but only receives new work from time-to-time. Lennart and Kay Sievers are looking at adding Gummiboot to systemd to complete the safety chain of the boot process with UEFI Secure Boot. Systemd will communicate with this UEFI boot loader to ensure the system didn't boot into a compromised state."
as long as M$ does not use the DMCA to lock in windows it's fine.
Yes, UEFI is still an evil misguided thing.
But let's make the best of the situation.
With Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers lol. 2 of the most untrustworthy and two faced developers in the Linux world.
Something isn't quite right here
Just over four months ago, I updated my Debian testing workstation. To keep a long story short, systemd was installed, and my workstation basically got trashed. It no longer booted properly, and none of my attempts to fix it worked. I used a livecd to perform one final backup.
Have you tried it on a stable OS release that has systemd? I assume you know that testing is a development branch and is supposed to break, otherwise it would be called stable. Fedora has been using it for years now and it has been fine.
Pre-systemd Debian was famous for being incredibly stable for desktop usage even on unstable branch, not speaking about testing. The stable/testing/unstable separation mattered only on servers, and lots of less important servers actually used testing, as it was stable enough and had a bit fresher software than stable.
I don't really care for systemd being default in Debian, but it's sad to see Debian not only not enforcing the need of sysvinit compatibility in all packages in jessie, but also failing to make the systemd transition smooth.
"does everything you should want to do".
Do you work for Apple?
That's the problem. There isn't a stable release with systemd. The code isn't audited, nor has it seen actual production testing. It was just foisted on the end users without any transition period, possibly breaking every single app that uses the init.d mechanism for starting and control.
To boot, with systemd's ability to listen on the network, it has a good chance of becoming a massive remote root exploit in the waiting. Does it have any internal security? We can cross fingers that this large blob of new code does more harm than good, but all it takes is one glitch, and it would mean havoc worse than the RTM worm on the UNIX side ages ago, or the Windows worms in the early 2000s.
It really is the one and only thing that Linux has been missing for more than 20 years.
Oh gosh no. For the first time in about 10 years I can no longer get my laptop to sleep reliably using the sleep key, because systemd is eating the events and doing something with them. I've discussed it with various people online and off and no one has been able to help me figure it out.
The thing is, maybe Linux did need a better boot process (though I've never seen any enormously convinving arguments as it's not like Linux never worked before systemd), but systemd seems to be a bit of a hive of complexity and opaqueness.
The fact that I can't debug problems that didn't used to be problems is not an enormous point in its favour. It's that sort of reason why so many people are suspicious of it. Well, that and binary log files.
and does everything you should want to do.
Well, technically, "everything you should want" is a subset of "everything under the this sun and all others", so systemd does indeed qualify as doinng everything anyone wants.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Can be used for good or evil. Depends if control is in the hands of the hardware manufacturers or the users.
Are you being dense in purpose? The problem is not learning something new, is imposing a political decision down your throat, and letting the cornerstone of open source, choice, out of the equation. Even in my testing servers where sysv was installed, an upgrade was forced to systemd breaking my corporate setup rules and my configurations. What the hell is that?
The Systemd Consortium of Uber-Masters (SCUM) is proud to announce the finalization of it's acquisition of the NSA. Hot on the heels of absorbing the CIA and FBI, Vice Chancellor Lennart Poettering had this to say: ".. this brings us one step closer to our ulitimate goal of reducing complexity for the common man."
3-4 naysayers? More like the majority of the linux community. As for a new init process, sure , there's room for *improvement*. Systemd is not an improvement - its a bug ridden overly complex dogs dinner that is one mans ego trip being ridden roughshod through the whole linux/unix principal of KISS and do one thing well. Now you might not give a stuff about that principal but most of us do and we do not want to see this POS being installed by default.
I think the bigger complaint is that it's being added to systemd, not that it exists (Note that GRUB can already be used with secure boot). Lennart Poettering is pretty disliked for his abandonment of UNIX principles (the biggest one being portability), and somehow his software becomes the de facto standard in the Linux world, long before it is ready (PulseAudio anyone)? He creates issues and fractures the community, and then blames everyone else for the problems.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
https://wiki.debian.org/Debian...
Nearly every single time Debian has made major plumbing changes, by for example upgrading or changing major boot packages that run by default, they've broken testing. Read the archives and you'll even find times they've corrupted peoples drives. Maybe you should be aware of what you are using, for gods sake they have a warning when you install testing that you run the chance of total data loss and having to format and reinstall.
But of course you know better than the Debian Developers!
This is quite the common tactic in some places. So much so that islamists have a word for it: taqiyya.
No, I'm not saying you should grow a beard and start wearing a tent, go ass-in-the-air on a mat five times a day offering praise to the prophet poettering. I'm saying your words employ a tactic that's been used before, to the point that there's a word for it.
Here's what sure looks like Mr Poettering's plan going forward:
1. Expand systemd to the point where large swaths of everything depend on it, so that he is controlling as much of the code base as possible.
2. Insult Linus Torvalds for a while to try to undermine his authority.
3. Fork Linux, or demand that Linus give control of Linux over to him, or he will rage-quit and take his code with him.
His goal doesn't seem to be great code (given the number of times he's screwed up big time), or great design (given that he seems to ignore everything Thompson, Ritchie, etc said about how Unix should work). It sure seems to be about becoming the Grand High Poobah of the open source world, without any idea what that actually takes.
What he doesn't understand is that Linus is in charge because other open source developers genuinely respect his judgment. If Linus was doing a lousy job in his role, there would be calls for Alan Cox or someone else who's been in the inner circle forever to take over, and Linus might actually step aside. If, on the other hand, you're running around insulting everyone for no good reason, you're not going to have the respect of other developers, and they will quite happily shunt you aside, forking systemd if necessary to get rid of you, and life will go on.
Lovely to see how the systemd bunch has gone from a political movement to a religious cult in mere months, starting when it became painfully obvious they had run out of arguments shortly before.
But then Fedora and systemd has been developed in lockstep pretty much since day one.
Frankly at this point they may as well rename it PoetteringOS to make it clear who is wearing that hat...
He invented the OS, which people thought was great from day one. That gives Torvalds the right to be a pill.
Pottering created a shit audio system that people reviled from day one. That gives us the right to tell him to GFY.
*adjusts tinfoil hat*
systemd is part of a plan by the US government infiltrate and subvert the GNU/Linux operating system via the Red Hat corporation.
It is no secret the US government (really, all governments) believes they should have full access to your communications and computing devices. If they can buy your information, they will. If they can't buy it, they'll force it with secret warrants and national security letters. If they can't force it, they'll subvert it, like intentionally weakening encryption algorithms. There's little doubt the NSA and pals have plants at every major tech company probing (or perhaps creating) vulnerabilities they can exploit.
However, 80% of servers on the Internet run Linux. 85% of smart phones run Linux. My router, my NAS, even my surround sound receiver came with a copy of the GPL because they run versions of the Linux kernel. And there's no single point of attack against Linux. You can't strong-arm a Linux distribution into including a back door for you like you could Microsoft or Apple.
Do you think the spooks are going to sit there and say "aw shucks, guess we just can't break into 80% of the stuff on the Internet. Let's call it a day." Of course not. So if you can't buy and you can't force, you infiltrate and subvert. You take your project and worm it into the Linux ecosystem until everything is dependent on it. You make it bloated and barely auditable, your people are in charge and can steer the project direction. And you can hide exploits in plain sight (see Underhanded C Contest).
Redhat has been worming projects under their direction, most notably systemd, into the Linux ecosystem. Red Hat's #1 customer is and 50% of their revenue comes from the US Army.
It's a conspiracy I tell you. A C-O-N...spiracy.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
If the transition was going to be smooth it would have been wheezy not Jessie. They waited and so it was bumpy Had they waited longer it would have been more bumpy.
As for not enforcing the need for sysvinit compatibility how did you want them to do that?
It has been shipping in Fedora for the past four years, and in RHEL since last summer. If that's not production testing then what is?
And to think, enterprise users are still complaining about problems that SystemD is creating, but those issues are being shrugged off as "working as expected".
To compare it, Windows 8 must be a success because it's been in production for a few years now. SystemD is nearly identical to Metro in every abstract way. The end users who care, don't want it, some people just accept it and think it's great. Well good for them, now give us an option to not use Metro/SystemD and let people who like it use it. the problem with SystemD is there is no option, everything breaks without it as more things become dependent on it.
UEFI and Systemd seem the perfect match: both pushed by shadowy, nefarious, a-hole entities, 'solving' problems in the worst locked-in ways possible, favoring certain for-profit institutions over all others, with a great possibility of backdoors built in to appease (or in paid service to) the organs of state security.
What's not to love?
Why would anyone use anything else from the guy that created PulseAudio?
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
What we're seeing is a real-life demonstration of "why you really shouldn't try to re-implement the first 4 network layers":
Because you're going to make all the same mistakes that were stomped out of the Unix TCP/IP stack over the last 25 years.