Re: [PATCH] Add linuxefi module

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@ubuntu.com>]

On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 05:29:03PM +0100, Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko wrote:
> This part is from RH "Secureboot" patch. Few things are right about that
> patch. Whatever signature verifications would need to be integrated with
> signatures framework (I have some scratch in phcoder/file_types)

The RH SB patch is not ideal from a pure GRUB point of view.  But
realistically, in order to actually be useful in the (unfortunate) SB
ecosystem that exists today where Microsoft is the effective root of
trust on most mass-market hardware, we need to have a non-GPLv3
component that is what the firmware actually loads directly, it needs to
be able to do signature checking in order to chain to GRUB, and it's
unlikely to be helpful for the signature checking to be implemented in
two places - so the scheme where GRUB calls out to shim seems to be an
uncomfortable necessity there.

I have no objection to there being some more native mechanism in GRUB
that works when users take control of their own trust chain; that seems
entirely consistent with the FSF's goals regarding UEFI.  But I'm having
trouble seeing how we could make use of it effectively in order to
bootstrap free operating systems on firmware that only has the Microsoft
keys in place, which I think is just as important now as the ability to
run GNU software on proprietary Unixes was back in the 1980s.

(Unless, of course, you mean that there ought to be something integrated
into GRUB's signatures framework that would let it optionally call out
to shim; that would be an interesting possibility.)

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson@ubuntu.com]