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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."
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.
I concur, I have been using Fedora for quite a few years and have never had a problem with systemd. I unfortunately think our words are totally wasted on the haters though .
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
Have you tried it on a stable OS release that has systemd?
You mean like Fedora/RH which has 4 'urgent' severity bugs with systemd
Including one where systemd breaks Keyboard shortcuts handling in text virtual consoles on Redhat Enterprise Linux.
If you lower the bar to "high" priority you get some fun ones like:
Unable to boot when systemd's LogTarget is set to syslog-or-kmsg or syslog on RHEL7. (The devs left it at "Ok, dropping log messages even just from systemd itself isn't probaly a best way, but wee need more time for investigation." in September 2014).
reboot or shutdown commands unresponsive during systemd-fsck
systemd stuck when auto-mouting volume for NFS
Systemd doesn't unmount all devices before calling reboot/halt and thus corrupts a clean RAID1
These aren't "oops, I can't play MP3" level bugs.
First of all, UEFI is more than Secure Boot. UEFI has been standard on PCs for the past few years, and on Macs ever since they switched to x86. Secure Boot is just a feature of some newer UEFI implementations.
Second, Secure Boot is a legitimate security feature that helps to protect against boot-time malware. There's nothing inherently evil about it. The controversy is over who should have the power to decide which OS is considered trustworthy and allowed to boot: the owner of the computer, or the vendor of the OS that came preinstalled on the computer?
Naturally, you don't want to buy a computer that doesn't let you choose which OS you trust. But if you have a computer that does give you that choice, why not take advantage of it? Seems to me that it's good to have hardware vendors see increased demand for machines that support securely booting the OS of your choice, as opposed to those where you just have to disable Secure Boot entirely if you want to run something other than Windows.