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UEFI Secure Boot Booted From Debian 9 'Stretch' (theregister.co.uk)

Debian's release team has decided to postpone its implementation of Secure Boot. From a report: In a release update from last week, release team member Jonathan Wiltshire wrote that "At a recent team meeting, we decided that support for Secure Boot in the forthcoming Debian 9 'stretch' would no longer be a blocker to release. The likely, although not certain outcome is that stretch will not have Secure Boot support." "We appreciate that this will be a disappointment to many users and developers," he continued, "However, we need to balance that with the limited time available for the volunteer teams working on this feature, and the risk of bugs being introduced through rushed development." The decision not to offer Secure Boot support at release leaves Debian behind Red Hat and Suse, making it the only one of Linux's three main branches not to support the heir-to-BIOS and the many security enhancements it offers.

4 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. "Heir-to-BIOS?" by hackel · · Score: 3, Informative

    Lot of FUD being spread in this article. Debian certainly supports UEFI, the *true* "heir-to-BIOS." Secure Boot was a terrible technology from the start. It's disappointing that they weren't able to finish work on it in time, but this certainly isn't the huge issue this article is making it out to be. The majority of Debian installations are going to be in virtualised environments in the first place. Desktop users are probably going to be on testing or another Debian derivative. It kind of makes me angry that Ubuntu didn't contribute this code to Debian straight away, but what can you do.

  2. Re:RedHat by networkBoy · · Score: 4, Informative

    I have to disagree, at least on the BIOS front.
    BIOS is a mess, hard to code for, pragmatically impossible to patch (how many users will actually do the updates).
    BIOS is a 16 bit system... it _needed_ to go away.
    UEFI may not be perfect, and it may not be the best delivery, but BIOS simply can't support what systems provide these days. > 512 byte disk sectors, SSDs, massive ram, BIOS is crap at all of them. Sure you can shoehorn some support in, but it's still crap. Most systems have been on EFI much longer than most people realize (mid 90's for big systems, 2000 for consumer), and uEFI since 05.

    --
    whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
  3. Re:RedHat by whoever57 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Ah, so you just want to sacrifice package quality and QA, while adopting dependency hell,

    Begone, Troll!

    RedHat/CentOS haven't suffered from dependency hell for years. The adoption of YUM solved the issues.

    --
    The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
  4. Re: RedHat by fred6666 · · Score: 3, Informative

    PC hardware support is still years ahead on Linux, especially for stuff such as WiFi adapters and GPU.